Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir Page 8

  Police officer Lorena Zugarini (left) and Rita Ficarra, my chief interrogator (right), lead me to a squad car after my arrest. (© Pietro Crocchioni/epa/Corbis)

  Chapter 8

  November 3, 2007, Day Two

  When Raffaele and I returned to the questura on Saturday, at 11 A.M., the waiting room was empty. Some of Meredith’s British friends were flying home that day, too devastated and scared to stay. Two of the girls had caught a bus to the airport at seven o’clock—about the time I was finally just getting to sleep.

  I had the same opportunity. Mom had asked in one of our phone conversations the night before if I wanted her to buy me a plane ticket to Seattle. “No,” I said. I had been adamant. “I’m helping the police.”

  I never considered going home. I didn’t think it was right to run away, and that’s exactly how I looked at it—as running away from being an adult. I knew that murders can and do happen anywhere, and I was determined not to let this tragedy undo all I’d worked so hard for over the past year. I liked my classes at the University for Foreigners, and I knew my family’s finances didn’t allow for re-dos. The way I saw it, if I went home, I’d be admitting defeat. And my leaving wouldn’t bring Meredith back.

  But I understood why Meredith’s British girlfriends were panic-stricken. I was, too. That morning a London newspaper had called Meredith’s killer “a knife-wielding maniac.” He was still on the loose, possibly getting ready to strike other victims, possibly me. I didn’t need Chris to warn me against being alone. I was already so paranoid I refused to let Raffaele out of sight in his one-room apartment. Walking down the street with his arm around me, I kept looking nervously over my shoulder to make sure no one was following us. Passing cars made me jump. Had the murderer watched our house, waiting until one of us was alone to make his move? I couldn’t help but wonder, Would I have died if I’d been home Thursday night? All that separated Meredith’s and my room was one thin wallboard. Why am I alive and she’s now lying in the morgue? And: Could I be the next victim?

  I hated that I felt so traumatized. As my family, friends, and the UW foreign exchange office checked in one after another, they each said some version of “Oh my God, you must be so scared and alone.” I didn’t want to admit that they were right, that what I was going through was too stressful for me to handle by myself. But the last thing I wanted from my parents—even though it’s probably what I needed most—was to be treated like a child.

  I believed I had to demonstrate to Mom, Dad, and myself—as if my whole personhood depended on it—that I was in control, that I could take care of things in a mature, responsible way. And just as I’d had some wrong-headed notion about the link between casual sex and adulthood, I was also sure that an adult would know how to deal with whatever was thrown at her—including how to behave if her roommate were brutally murdered. It wasn’t logical, but I believed that I’d made the decision to come to Perugia and that, while no one could possibly have anticipated Meredith’s death, I just had to suck it up. I treated the whole incident as if it were an unanticipated situation I had found myself in and now I had to handle it.

  So, anytime I was on the phone with my parents I put my energy into reassuring them that I was okay. Just as I hadn’t wanted to alarm my mom when I’d first run out of the villa after seeing the poop in the toilet, I still didn’t want to alarm her. Therefore, each phone conversation was more or less the same. “Yeah, I’m really tired, but it’s going to be okay. I’m with Raffaele. He’s taking good care of me. My roommates are looking for a new place. Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry.”

  We don’t have a traditional parent-child relationship, one where they would have insisted I come home against my wishes. And, at the time, I believed what I was telling them. But looking back now, I think I was too afraid to admit the truth, that it would somehow mean I’d failed.

  On a Saturday morning when I would ordinarily have been drinking coffee in my pajamas and reading my Italian Harry Potter, I was sitting in a sterile police office waiting to be questioned—again. I was wearing the same clothes I’d put on for my date with Raffaele a day earlier; they were now all I had. I’d hardly slept in twenty-four hours. Nor had I been able to quell the mind-flattening rage that had erupted the previous night. The only way to do that, I was sure, was to help the police find Meredith’s killer. I wanted justice for her, and as her friend, roommate, and the person who might also have been murdered had I been there that night, I was sure I was the police’s best resource.

  The police immediately sent Raffaele home and sat me down in front of an old computer monitor to identify who was who in Facebook pictures of Meredith and her friends on Halloween. I didn’t know many of her buddies to begin with, but the job of figuring out people’s identities had been rendered nearly impossible by the fact that almost everyone, including Meredith, was wearing a lurid disguise—zombie paint, Scream masks, fake teeth, vampire blood. The irony was painful.

  When we finished, a detective put me through a second round of questioning, this time in Italian. Did we ever smoke marijuana at No. 7, Via della Pergola? “No, we don’t smoke,” I lied, squirming inwardly as I did.

  I didn’t see that Laura had left me with any choice, and I felt completely trapped by her demand. I could barely breathe until the detective moved on to a new topic, and when he did, I was hugely relieved. I thought that was the end of it.

  Even through the language barrier, I picked up on a change in the detective’s tone from the night before. He was pushy, his questions repetitive. He told me to list the people who’d visited our house, and any guys Meredith knew. “We need every name,” he said. “Who invited them? How many times did they come over? What type of relationship did Meredith have with them? Did she ever have a fight with them?”

  Aside from what I said about our villa’s drug habits, I told him everything I could possibly think of. I scoured my brain to remember anyone who had even glanced at Meredith. I scrolled through my Italian phone and gave him the names and numbers of every contact I had. Even with all that, he acted as if what I’d told him wasn’t enough. He kept pressing for more. I didn’t have any more.

  It’s hard to believe I had no inkling that the police suspected me. But why would they have? I was innocent. I’d been taught by my parents to do my civic duty. I was so intent on helping them, I couldn’t step back. And I thought I understood why they were pressuring me.

  If you drew a diagram with Meredith’s housemates in one circle and her friends in another, I was the only person in Italy in both circles. Unlike Laura and Filomena, Meredith and I were close in age, both college students, and native English speakers. Unlike Amy, Robyn, and the other British girls, we spit out our toothpaste into the same sink and shared the food in the fridge. If anyone knew a detail that could help track down her killer, it would likely have been me.

  When I wasn’t being questioned, I hung out in the waiting room for the police to give me a new set of instructions. I spent almost every free minute on the phone with one of my parents. Mom and Aunt Dolly had decided it would be good for me to spend some time with Dolly and her family in Hamburg until the murderer was caught. I was willing to go anywhere, as long as it wasn’t home for good.

  That afternoon, I was talking to a steely brown-haired police officer named Rita Ficarra—although I didn’t find out her name until two years later, when she testified against me in court. I said, “My parents want me to go to Germany to stay with relatives for a couple of weeks. Is that okay?”

  She said, “You can’t leave Perugia. You’re an important part of the investigation.”

  She didn’t seem like a person you’d ever want to argue with. “How long will you need me?” I asked.

  “We don’t know—maybe months,” she said.

  This stunned me. “But I’m planning to go home for Christmas.”

  “Well, we’ll decide if you can do that,” she said. “We’ll have to hear what the magistrate says when he calls in three
days.”

  When I repeated this conversation to my mom, she was concerned. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said.

  Later that afternoon, Mom asked, “Amanda, do you need me there?”

  Although it had been only one day since Meredith’s body had been discovered, I said, “I know I’ll be okay, but I’d really appreciate it if you came.”

  My chest loosened when she called back again with her flight information. She was due to land in Rome on Tuesday morning, November 6. From there she’d take a train to Perugia, and I’d meet her at the station. She said she wanted to help me find a new place to live and buy me some clothes. I looked at her visit as a way to get my life back on track.

  Sometime that afternoon the police drove me to the villa. Sitting in the backseat with an interpreter on the way there, I admitted, “I’m completely exhausted.”

  One of the officers in the front seat swung around and looked at me. Her reaction was harsh: “Do you think we’re not tired? We’re working twenty-four/seven to solve this crime, and you need to stop complaining. Do you just not care that someone murdered your friend?”

  The police told me to cover myself in the car as we neared the villa, so that the satellite trucks and photographers who’d commandeered the parking lot above us, their cameras aimed right on our driveway, wouldn’t see me. I ducked down, and the interpreter covered me with her coat. They left me hunched over like that while they got out.

  As I sat there, I thought about Meredith. She was quiet and kept to herself at home, but she was smart, cheerful, generous. I still couldn’t believe that she was gone. I was overwhelmed by the enormity, the finality of her death. I wondered how her family was coping with the news. Meredith had told me that her mother had health issues, and I hoped her daughter’s sudden, shocking death hadn’t triggered an episode. I felt sorry for Meredith’s sister. What would I do if something were to happen to one of mine?

  When the police finally came to get me, I saw that the entrance to our apartment was blocked off with yellow police tape. Instead of going in, the police had me show them from the outside what I’d noticed about Filomena’s window, asking whether the shutters were opened or closed when Raffaele and I had come home. They wanted details about how we lived. Did we usually lock the gate to our driveway? What about the faulty lock on the front door? Did anyone else have a key? Were there outside lights on at night? Did Meredith often stay there alone? Did we have frequent visitors?

  Then the police led me around back to the downstairs apartment. The glass in the guys’ front door had been shattered and lay everywhere. I gasped, thinking someone had since broken in there, too. The police said, “No, no, no. We kicked it in ourselves.” They handed me protective booties and gloves. After I slipped them on, I sang out, “Ta-dah,” and thrust out my arms like the lead in a musical.

  It was an odd setting for anything lighthearted, but having just been reprimanded for complaining, I wanted to be friendly and show that I was cooperating. I hoped to ease the tension for myself, because this was so surreal and terrifying. Instead of smiling, they looked at me with scorn. I kept trying to recalibrate my actions, my attitude, my answers, to get along, but I couldn’t seem to make things better no matter what I did. I wasn’t sure why.

  I followed behind them in silence. We stopped first at Stefano’s room. The comforter on his bed was crumpled up and stained with blood. I took another sharp breath. They said, “Do you see anything not normal?”

  It seemed a bizarre thing to ask. I said, “Yes, there are bloodstains.” The sight of it made my heart and mind race. I was trying to piece together what I’d seen. The agonizing thought that maybe Meredith had been attacked downstairs and chased back into our apartment before she was killed struck me like a physical blow. I kept thinking about how utterly terrified she must have been. I wanted to know what she had been through in her final moments, but at the same time I couldn’t bear to go there.

  I didn’t think I could take any more surprises, but they kept coming. Next, the police opened up a closet to reveal five thriving marijuana plants. “Does this look familiar?” they asked.

  “No,” I said. Despite my earlier lie about not smoking in our house, I was now telling the truth. I was stunned that the guys were growing a mini-plantation of pot. I couldn’t believe I had talked to them every day since I’d moved in six weeks earlier and they’d never mentioned it. I said, “I don’t really hang out down here a lot.”

  Next we went to the room that Marco and Giacomo shared. There was no blood—or contraband plants. While we stood there, the detectives started asking me pointed questions about Giacomo and Meredith. How long had they been together? Did she like anal sex? Did she use Vaseline?

  “For her lips,” I said. When I’d first gotten to town, Meredith and I had hunted around at different grocery stores until we found a tiny tub of Vaseline.

  Giacomo and Meredith had definitely had sex, but I certainly didn’t know which positions they’d tried. Meredith didn’t talk about her sex life in detail. The most she’d done was ask me once if she could have a couple of the condoms I kept stashed with Brett’s still-unused gift, the bunny vibrator, in my see-through beauty case in the bathroom Meredith and I shared.

  I couldn’t understand why the police were asking me about anal sex. It disturbed me. Were they hinting that Meredith had been raped? What other unthinkably hideous things had happened to her?

  After that, I was taken back to the car and left alone. I felt as though I’d been emotionally thrashed, and I lay in the backseat staring blankly at the floor. The interpreter came up to the window and asked if I was all right.

  “No,” I said. “I’m confused and tired, and I can’t help imagining all the horrible things Meredith must have gone through.”

  Back at the questura, I had to repeat for the record everything I’d been asked about at the villa. It was a tedious process at the end of a difficult day.

  Finally, at around 7 P.M., I was allowed to call Raffaele to pick me up. While I was waiting for him, Aunt Dolly phoned. “Did you ask the police if you can leave Perugia? If you can come to Germany?” she asked.

  “Yeah, and they said no, that I’d have to wait until they heard from the magistrate in three days. Whatever that means.”

  “If they really want to question you, they can do it from Germany,” Dolly said. “Maybe we should find a lawyer for you so they don’t say you have to stay there forever.”

  “Yeah. I’ll wait to see what they say in three days.”

  “Okay,” Dolly said. “Let’s wait for Tuesday. Then, if they don’t let you know when you can leave, tell them you have to contact the American embassy to get a lawyer. Without a doubt the embassy will help you, Amanda.”

  As I walked outside the questura, I saw the guys from downstairs coming in. After we said hello, I wavered for a moment over the police’s order that I never talk about what I saw. “I was at your apartment today and you should know that your comforter was splotched with blood, Stefano. It made me wonder if Meredith was down there before she died. It was awful.”

  “Yeah,” Stefano, said. “I hope that was from our cat and not Meredith.” Stefano, Giacomo, and Marco exchanged anxious looks.

  Just then, Raffaele drove up and I said good-bye to the guys. Raffaele took me to a small boutique downtown called Bubble, next door to a luxury lingerie shop. Pulsating with music, Bubble catered to students, offering trendy, cheaply made clothing, the kind that’s not meant to outlast a season. I tried on a few things but decided to wait until my mom got to town to replace my staples, which were locked in the crime scene. I settled on one necessity, grabbing a pair of cotton bikini briefs in my size from a display rack near the cash register. In the long run it probably would have been better if I’d chosen a more sedate color than red. I didn’t give it another thought, but it turned out that what was insignificant to me was a big deal to other people. Standing at the cash register as he paid, Raffaele hugged me and gave me a few kisses�
�our lingua franca in a scary, sad time. A few weeks later, the press would report that I bought “a saucy G-string” and that Raffaele brazenly announced: “I’m going to take you home so we can have wild sex together.”

  The main event of the night was getting together with Laura and Filomena. I was living inside a vacuum—I was staying with Raffaele, I’d spent the day with the police, and I was talking to the disembodied voices of my family. I needed the ballast I knew my flatmates would give me. We sat around their friend’s kitchen table and talked while Laura and Filomena chain-smoked. It was good to download with them. We were as close to normal as possible and wasted no time in speculating about what could possibly have happened at the villa. One scenario was that Meredith had come into the house, locked the front door behind her, and then the murderer broke in to find her there. After killing her, he stole her key to unlock the front door and ran, leaving the door swinging open in the frigid November breeze. Another was that Meredith had come home alone to find the killer biding his time, waiting inside for the first person through the door. I told them about the blood in the downstairs apartment and my worries that Meredith had been chased around there.

  All these possibilities left me feeling chilled.

  “It’s strange to me that whoever did this only wrecked one room and didn’t steal anything. Why do you think that was?” I asked.

  Laura said, “I don’t know. We just have to let the police do their job. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.”

  “The police are grilling me endlessly,” I said.

  Filomena said, “I know it’s hard, Amanda. You’ve just got to be patient. They’re fixated on you because you knew Meredith better than we did.”