The Dark Lady of Seattle

[bijou]

An Italian newspaper called her the Dark Lady of Seattle, but it is the nickname she gave herself on her blog, Foxy Knoxy, that has stuck. Amanda Knox, a 20-year-old American student, is a key suspect in the sexual abuse and murder of her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher, 21, in the otherwise-idyllic hill town of Perugia in Umbria on November 1 last year.

A senior Italian investigator, meeting her for the first time after the killing, says he was impressed by Knox’s “virgin-like beauty”. But in the same breath, he added that he was struck even more by the way she played with the truth. “Knox is very calculating. She lies shamelessly,” he said.

Precisely how an attractive, gifted, wholesome American student found herself at the heart of a particularly sordid and brutal murder has yet to be established by prosecutors and the police. They have dozens of blood samples and other forensic evidence to analyse from the whitewashed cottage where Knox and Kercher lived – and four suspects.

Knox, her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 23, and two other acquaintances – Rudy Hermann Guede, 20, from the Ivory Coast, and Patrick Diya Lumumba, 37, the Congolese manager of the bar where Knox worked – are as yet uncharged of sexually abusing and murdering Kercher, a Leeds University student from Coulsdon in Greater London. They are all in jail save for Lumumba, who has been released but is still being investigated.
... According to the 50-page autopsy report, Kercher was stabbed three times in the neck. The last and deepest thrust missed her carotid artery, but Kercher is believed to have been in agony for about 10 minutes before bleeding to death. Traces of both Knox’s and Kercher’s DNA have been found on the eight-inch kitchen knife thought to be the murder weapon; Knox’s was near the handle and Kercher’s was at the tip of the blade.

Files from the investigation seen by The Sunday Times Magazine, including the suspects’ testimonies to investigators and to their own lawyers as well as witness statements and interviews with judicial and police sources, paint a more perplexing portrait of Foxy Knoxy.


Knox was born and grew up in Seattle on America’s northern Pacific coast, famous for Bill Gates, Boeing and Starbucks. Her mother, Edda, is a maths teacher; her father, William, the vice-president of the local Macy’s department store. They divorced in 1989, when Knox was two years old, and have both remarried since.

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I don't know how much publicity this has had in the US, but understandably it has been big news in the UK