Things said and left unsaid: Barbie Nadeau’s coverage of the Knox/Sollecito case (Part XIII)

Ms. Barbie Nadeau’s book on the murder of Meredith Kercher is now out and will be reviewed here soon. A reading of some of her Newsweek and Daily Beast articles may give a glimpse of what to expect. Early in the article Ms. Nadeau wrote, “Just days after Kercher's body was found last November in the villa Knox shared with the victim, security camera footage showed the couple buying lingerie in a local store, with Knox giggling and telling Sollecito, ‘Afterwards I'm going to take you home so we can have wild sex together.’” Ms. Nadeau’s account is misleading in several respects. Ms. Knox did not have access to her own belongings at this time (her flat was a crime scene) and needed to buy underwear and borrow jeans. The security camera did not have sound, and witnesses say that the store has very loud music, making it difficult to overhear someone’s conversation. Whether the merchant, who was a paid interviewee and the actual source of the quote, spoke English or not is disputed. However, the couple did kiss in the store, and their demeanor appears playful.

Ms. Nadeau went on, “And by her own account in a prison diary leaked to the media, she details her sexual escapades with at least seven men she'd been with in her three months in Italy before her arrest. She even wrote that she might have HIV and then she uses a process of elimination to narrow down who might have given it to her. The diary is part of the collection of evidence and could be damaging to Knox in a court trial. Recently leaked segments of her continuing tome paint a disturbing picture of her state of mind. In one entry, she writes: ‘I think it's possible that Raffaelle went to Meredith's house, raped her, then killed her and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he pressed my fingerprints n the knife.’”

Mark Waterbury rightly took Ms. Nadeau to task for the many problems with her assertions. Ms. Knox wrote of having seven intimate partners her whole life because she was told that she was or might be HIV-positive. Ms. Knox’s diary shows her emotional distress, and to claim that it “details her sexual escapades” is so blatantly wrong that it leaves one wondering what Ms. Nadeau could possibly have been thinking. Some of the most problematic assertions, including the incorrect description of the night of the murder, were based on an English translation of an Italian translation of her diary, instead of the original. When she was contacted about the mistranslation, Ms. Nadeau claimed that there was a second diary, but she is the only reporter who has made this claim to the best of my knowledge.

The last portion of the article says as much about Ms. Nadeau as about the case. “To complicate things further, Sollecito and Knox's reported break up prompted speculation that they would testify against each other. But Sollecito's flowers may be a signal that their defense teams may actually work together to pin the blame on Guede. If that strategy succeeds, the cipher of Amanda Knox may never truly be decoded.” Ms. Nadeau’s use of the word “pin” suggests that she believed Knox and Sollecito were guilty. Her linking the potential success of their blaming Mr. Guede to the potential failure to decipher Ms. Knox leaves little doubt about her opinion on their culpability. Why Newsweek entrusted their coverage of this case to her is the real mystery.

Let us consider some of her entries at The Daily Beast more briefly and with comments interspersed. In a recent article Nadeau wrote, “Shortly after her arrest, Knox admitted to being at the Perugian villa when Kercher was murdered. The confession was later thrown out of the body of evidence because of allegations of police brutality and coercion, but much of what she said in that original statement coincides with known elements of the case, including evidence gathered by CCTV footage from a nearby parking garage.” The CCTV footage may be of Meredith entering her cottage for the last time. Yet it is what this article does not say that is at least equally troubling. Nothing about the police giving out false information and only a little to on the British press, which sometimes behaved outrageously. Meredith’s father, John Kercher, was part of the British tabloid press corps, and this may explain some of the contempt the British press exhibited toward Ms. Knox.

Shortly after the conviction, Ms. Nadeau began an article, “Is the real Amanda Knox the sex-obsessed, cold-blooded murderer that the prosecution depicted? Or worse?” This question and the title of her article are truly egregious, worthy of comparison to the Newsweek mug shot cover on the Duke lacrosse case in 2006, and that is saying something. Clearly Ms. Nadeau had access to Edda Mellas and Curt Knox, which undercuts her claim about being shut out in the article about how the media got the case wrong (see above). The rest of the article lacks a critical appraisal of the forensics. “They [the jury] wondered why Amanda’s DNA and Meredith’s blood was wiped away and recovered with Luminol. They thought it was Raffaele’s bloody footprint on the bathroom rug and his DNA on Meredith’s bra clasp. They believed the prosecutor’s testimony that Meredith’s DNA was on the blade of the knife that had Amanda’s DNA on the handle.” There is no reason to assume that a substance that tests positive with Luminol is blood; it is a presumptive test that needs to be confirmed with one that is more specific for blood.

Immediately after the conviction Ms. Nadeau wrote, “At one point the stepmother of Raffaele Sollecito, Knox’s former boyfriend who was sentenced to 25 years for his part in the murder, yelled out ‘F@#k you,’” Ms. Nadeau is the only reporter who heard this; others heard, “Forte, Raffaele,” which just means strength, Raffaele. “But in the end, the two judges and six lay jurors trusted the sanctity of the DNA evidence, and doubted the words of Knox and Sollecito….For those who believed that Knox was guilty, the most damning evidence was the presence of her DNA mixed with Kercher’s blood in the house, and her statement that she was in the house at the time of the murder.” Ms. Nadeau has never written about the open letter signed by nine DNA forensics experts, but even if she is unaware of their views, she should know that the quality of the DNA evidence is very much in dispute.

Ms. Nadeau wrote about the jury’s report on its reasons for conviction, “A spot of Knox and Kercher’s mixed blood in one of the bedrooms, found using Luminol, and four additional spots in the small bathroom the girls shared also swayed the jurors.” The claim that finding Knox’s DNA mixed with Kercher’s blood means that their blood was mixed is dubious.

Quoting prosecutor Mignini Nadeau wrote, “’The window was broken from the inside, not the outside. The glass was on top of the clothes that had been strewn around the room, not under them. The break-in was staged and Knox is the one who did it.’ He also hinted that Knox and Sollecito might have been in a drug-fueled frenzy when they allegedly killed Kercher. He outlined the effects of cocaine and acid, and told the judges and jury how Knox and Sollecito ran with a crowd that often used these ‘stupificante,’ or stupefying drugs.” What drugs? Knox and Sollecito acknowledge smoking marijuana but no evidence of other drugs was presented. The notion that the window was broken from the inside is not convincing. Ms. Nadeau presents this closing argument without commenting on its many problems. This is only a reasonable approach if we accept this blog entry as pure reporting (with Ms. Nadeau reporting and editorializing are sometimes mixed. And yet after the introductory paragraph, eight of the nine succeeding paragraphs cover Mr. Mignini’s summation, whereas only one covers the defense’s summation.

“Other evidentiary problems include the lack of video or audio tapes of Knox’s original interrogation and the scientific police forgetting to pick up a bra clasp for nearly six weeks. That clasp is said to have Sollecito’s DNA on the metal hook and is the only material evidence police have tying Sollecito to the crime. While these obvious errors might well establish reasonable doubt in an American courtroom, it is unlikely they will have the same effect here in Italy, where defendants often seem to be presumed guilty until proven innocent.”

“Last July, testimony by noted forensic specialist Adriano Tagliabracci was abruptly suspended after the defense discovered that they had not been given all the prosecution’s evidence reports. Specifically, they did not have crucial evidence about Sollecito’s DNA found on the clasp of the bloodied bra that was cut from Kercher after she was stabbed.”

“Saturday’s hearing ended with a dramatic exchange about whether the prosecution had given the defense key documents regarding the DNA on Kercher’s bra. The charge was seen as a blatant attempt by the prosecution to throw the defense’s witness, and it worked. The exchange ended with Sollecito’s lawyers accusing the prosecution with illegality—a move many thought was primarily to set the stage for an appeal if one or both are convicted.” These three examples show that Ms. Nadeau does report on some aspects of the case that create sympathy for the defendants.

Ms. Nadeau wrote an article about Rudy Guede, who was the only person at that time convicted of Meredith Kercher’s murder. “’He has never changed his story,’ Guede’s lawyer, Valter Biscotti, told The Daily Beast this week. Biscotti would not supply any details about the version of events Guede gave at his own, closed-door trial, but he did say, ‘He has always maintained that they were all there, but that he is not the one who killed her.’” Ms. Nadeau did not comment on this remarkable assertion. When he was in Germany, the police intercepted one of Mr. Guede’s skype conversations in which he said that Amanda was not there. The first months after his arrest he said that an unidentified man murdered Ms. Kercher when Guede was on the toilet. Months later he began to claim that the man was Raffaele Sollecito and that Ms. Knox was at least present. ABC news reported that “Guede, 25, has at different times said the Knox, 22, of Seattle, was and was not at the house the night of the murder. At one point, he also implied that Knox's co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito was at the murder scene.”

Finally, I will expand upon a point I raised in the comments section of the previous article. In response to a question during a live chat, Ms. Nadeau said, “I think it is important to remember that the same scientific police and laboratories tested the DNA for all three suspects. That is to say, if the DNA matches Rudy and is accepted, then the DNA that matches the other two should also be accepted. How she may have left so little DNA if she was actually in the room is very hard to square.”

Ms. Nadeau is asserting implicitly that all DNA evidence is equal, but this is false. We know that the knife profile is weak, has drop-ins, and has considerable imbalance in intensity between most of the pairs of alleles. We know that the bra clasp was left in an insecure location for 47 days and handled poorly when it was finally collected. As Dan Krane said, “The science of DNA profiling is sound. But, not all of DNA profiling is science.” The evidence against Guede has never been released, and one cannot pass judgment on its quality without seeing it. There is second problem with Ms. Nadeau’s assertion. Rudy Guede was only identified as a suspect after the forensics came back, but Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox were already suspects (first on the basis of demeanor, then on the basis of their interrogations) before the forensics was completed. This problem is particularly acute for the bra clasp, and one has to consider the problem of confirmation bias or even outright fraud when weighing the forensic evidence. The third problem is that even within a lab, the quality of work may not be uniform. For one thing lab contamination can be a sporadic event, as it was in the Jaidyn Leskie case. For another, there may be a lone sloppy or dishonest technician in a lab full of competent, ethical ones.

Update 20 April 2010
I added a hyperlink to the Newsweek story in paragraph 1 and the word "to" in paragraph 6, line 4.