How Hacks Happen

The Amanda Knox Case: How To Get Arrested for Being Weird

• Many Worlds Productions • Season 4 • Episode 11

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Can you tell if someone is guilty just by looking at them? Let's delve into the infamous case of Amanda Knox, the American exchange student who was wrongfully accused of murdering her roommate in 2007. We'll talk bad cell phone forensics, media sensationalism, and cultural biases, and how they can lead to dire consequences for those who are judged not by evidence, but by how they act differently than society expects them to.

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Amanda Knox: How To Get Arrested for Being Weird

This is a story I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time. It all started when I was studying mobile forensics back in early 2015, and one of our assignments was to find a legal case where mobile forensics was used to find the perpetrator. I decided to cover the case of Amanda Knox.

For context, mobile forensics is the study of mobile devices like phones and tablets to find out what happened when, particularly for court cases. While mobile forensics can include things like GPS devices and tablets, it’s usually more about cell phones, like looking at text messages and cell tower pings and all the other stuff that gets collected as you go about your business with your phone. 

For that class, while studying the case of Amanda Knox, what I found still sticks with me to this day. So now, I’m going to talk about it today on How Hacks Happen. 

This isn’t an episode about a hack or a breach, or even about mobile forensics, but more about how digital forensics was not used in the way it should have been. It’s also about how the media twists a story for publicity, and how being a little weird could land you in a European prison.

Back in that class in 2015, for the assignment of finding a case that used mobile forensics, most of my fellow students presented cases of text messages incriminating someone, or cell phone towers pinging on a phone near a dead body. But I was like, “Meh, I want something with more juice.” And it was in one late-night internet search that I stumbled upon the case of Amanda Knox.
In 2007, Amanda Knox was a 20-year-old American exchange student living in Perugia, Italy, a small city about halfway between Florence and Rome. After Amanda was there for just a few weeks, one of her roommates, British exchange student Meredith Kercher, was found murdered in their cottage. She had been stabbed and strangled, and it looked like some sexual assault had taken place.

There was a mobile forensics aspect to the case. Meredith, who was from the UK, had two cell phones: one from home, and another one she had gotten in Italy, with a local phone number. Both were found tossed in a field near the house, but far enough away that a different cell tower would enter the mix if the phone was in the field. And data from cell phone towers showed that the phones were in the apartment until around 10 PM, then they were in the field by around 12:30 AM. 
The autopsies performed on Meredith’s body narrowed down the time of death to somewhere around midnight. So you kinda gotta figure, whoever murdered her tossed the phones right after. But there were no fingerprints or DNA on the phones, so that was a little bit of a dead end. All that did was help narrow down the time of the attack.

Amanda and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, discovered Meredith the next morning, when they returned to Amanda’s house after spending the night at Raffaele’s place.

The police found DNA all over Meredith’s bedroom that belonged to a guy named Rudy Guede. Rudy was a friend of their downstairs neighbor, and both Meredith and Amanda had met him at their neighbor’s parties. Rudy seemed kind of interested in Meredith, but she thought he was kind of creepy.

The reason the cops knew it was Rudy’s DNA is that he’d already been arrested multiple times for burglary and other crimes. It was also a little suspicious that Rudy high-tailed it out of the country right after Meredith’s murder. The police eventually picked him up in Germany and brought him back to Italy for trial.
And that’s when Guede spun his tale. He hadn’t murdered Meredith, you see. Meredith had invited him over for some sexy playtime, he said, but when he got there, Amanda and Raffaele were there, too. The four of them started having sexy playtime together, but at some point Amanda went into a rage and killed Meredith. Rudy, an innocent bystander, you see, he was simply defending Meredith when he made that bloody handprint on one of the pillows. And the whole thing freaked him out so much that he decided to skip town.

Mm-hmm. Yup. Okay.

You might think, what a load of crap. And you’d be right. But Amanda and Raffaele were arrested and charged anyway. The problem was, there were a lot of little things that caused problems for them when they went to defend themselves in court. Like, how they acted when they found out about the murder.
One was bits of Amanda’s DNA that they found on Meredith’s clothing, particularly on this one clasp of this bra strap. Not on any other part of the bra, just on this one tiny piece of metal. And bits of Amanda’s blood mixed in with Meredith’s, in the bathroom that they shared. Just tiny amounts.

To me, it seemed kind of ridiculous. I grew up in a large family with a lot of sisters, and you would have been hard pressed to find a single article of clothing in that house without all our DNA somewhere on it. Besides us borrowing each other’s clothes all the time and all our laundry often ending up in the same basket, our underwear would routinely end up in the wrong room, and would have to be delivered to the right address. And as for tiny bits of blood getting mingled up in the bathroom, come on. Women cut their fingers, they get their periods. It happens.

I imagine Amanda going “Hey, Meredith, your bra ended up in my laundry,” and the next thing you know, she’s on trial for murder.

But there was more to it than that. Even though there was next to zero evidence putting them at the scene of the crime, only the testimony of a convicted criminal who had nothing to lose by blaming it on someone else, Amanda and Raffaele were convicted because the authorities thought they were weird.

The two of them had admittedly been smoking a bunch of weed that night at his place, and according to the authorities, this proved two things: that Amanda was a drug addict, and that she was a big ol’ harlot, because she had only known Raffaele for a few days before she started banging him. Yeah, clearly a cold-blooded killer, because she fell in love and liked to get high.

This case infuriated me, for a bunch of reasons. One was that when I made my presentation in class, one of my fellow students piped up to tell me that he was sure Amanda Knox was guilty. “They all got high on pot,” he said, “and had some sex game, and Amanda stabbed her roommate to death in a big drug-fueled rage.”
This had me dumbfounded. A drug-fueled rage? I asked him, “Have you ever smoked pot?” To which he answered, “No.” Okay, just ask any paramedic—people who are high on weed are far preferred as patients over people who’ve had too much to drink. Rather than starting fights or trying to drive home and weaving all over the road, people who are high on weed, they’re more likely to babble about the meaning of life, and then fall asleep. Or eat a bunch of nachos, and then fall asleep.

Now, I’m not condoning smoking pot, just saying: it doesn’t turn people into murderers. Statistically, it is extremely rare to see a violent act committed solely under the influence of marijuana. Compare that to alcohol, which is linked to over 40% of violent crimes in the U.S., or meth, where people hallucinate enemies and pick fights with cops and trees and other inanimate objects.

Because I actually study these topics, I know these things. I look things up and I read forensics reports. And marijuana-induced violence is just not a thing. But the prosecution did not care. The Italian media didn’t care, either. And my fellow student—who, by the way, already had a job lined up with the NSA, the same agency that surveils all of us and uses digital forensics on a massive scale—he was absolutely convinced Amanda Knox stabbed her roommate to death during a wild sex game because they got too high on weed.

Now, mind you, this is years before I started this podcast, but being who I am, this exchange with my fellow student prompted me to delve even further into the case of Amanda Knox. I even joined some forums that were talking about it, and some of them were all in Italian.

And I saw the most outrageous stuff! Every single Italian on these boards was 100% sure that Amanda Knox was guilty. One wrote that of course she’s guilty, she was found covered in her roommate’s blood, holding the knife that killed her! Um, no, she wasn’t, which if you read any of the police reports or court records, you would know. But apparently, that’s what the newspapers said, so it must be true, right? 

Now, there were some issues with Amanda and Raffaele’s story. They both said they watched a movie around 6:00 at night, then Raffaele talked to his dad on the phone around 9, then they both turned off their phones and went to bed. Amanda said she didn’t wake up until 10 AM, and that’s when she left to go back to her house to shower and get changed.

There’s some discrepancies in there, like there’s an eyewitness that claims to have seen the two of them out at a park around 11 PM, and another one that claims to have seen Amanda at a convenience store around 7 AM. But still, nothing to place them at the house at the time Meredith was murdered.

Then there was the overnight interrogation. A few days after the murder, Amanda was questioned into the wee hours of the morning. She was denied a lawyer, and also denied food or water, and she was repeatedly smacked in the head until she came up with something. So she accused her boss, the owner of a bar, just to make it stop. And it turns out that he had a solid alibi. Amanda later apologized to him, but it left the question for the authorities to ask: if she would lie about that, what else is she lying about? You try getting interrogated all night and smacked in the head, see if you start lying.

Then there were other things, there were just the vibes. While police were swarming all over the house right after the murder was discovered, Amanda and Raffeale were seen cuddling and kissing outside. And then when she was in the police station waiting to be questioned, she started doing yoga. Clearly, a hardened criminal!

All of this reminds me of a situation that happened in September 2024 at Apalachee High School in Georgia. While a shooter was actively wandering the halls, a teacher got her students to hide, and then the teacher herself positioned herself at the door and held it closed. And during thois 20 agonizing minutes before the cops came to evacuate them, that teacher stood at that door, holding it closed with what looked like all her might. And at some point, she started to laugh. 

The moment was caught on video by one of her students, who posted it on Twitter and questioned how she could be laughing at a time like that. The video has been viewed millions of times, and has thousands of comments, all saying pretty much the same thing: it was nervous laughter. Different people react to stress differently. She was most definitely not laughing because she thought it was funny. She probably thought she might die in the next few minutes.

And in the same way, when people tried to console Amanda about Meredith’s death, she reacted angrily. She was so very angry that her roommate’s life had ended so senselessly and brutally and abruptly. And she was probably kind of afraid that it might happen to her, too. Amanda grieved in her own way. Which, unfortunately, was not the way you’re supposed to grieve, at least not in Italy.

This situation was so striking that author Malcolm Gladwell even featured the Amanda Knox case in one of his books, “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know.” The book highlights a lot of cases where people who are what Gladwell calls “mismatched”–they seem, according to our social norms, they seem to be innocent when they’re guilty, and guilty when they’re innocent. 

One of the main stories focuses on Hitler, who fooled politicians for years with his firm handshake and his friendly demeanor, which a lot of people mistook for trustworthiness. Famously, Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940, in 1938 he met with Adolf Hitler to try and avert a world war. Hitler assured Chamberlain that all he wanted was just a little piece of Czechoslovakia, that’s all, and after that he would be done with the rampaging through Europe. That’s all he wanted, just a little piece there. And Chamberlain took a good long look at Hitler, looked him in the eyes and thought, “Yeah, this is a man I can trust.” And we all know how that turned out.

And I even see this today in the Amanda Knox case, when I watch an interview with her on social media. The comments are full of stuff like, “You can tell just by looking at her, that she’s guilty.” Really, can you? This rather ordinary-looking woman, wearing a cardigan and talking a little awkwardly about everything that went down? You must have some serious psychic powers. And if that’s the case, why haven’t you won the lottery yet?

Now that serial killer Ted Bundy, on the other hand, charming guy, I guess. That’s what a lot of people thought, anyway, until he was caught and convicted of killing dozens of young women.

Another common comment I saw on these social media posts about Amanda Knox, “She won’t stop talking about it, so she must be guilty.” Well, okay. Since she was acquitted for good, Amanda Knox has become a passionate advocate for people who have been wrongfully accused. She collaborates with groups like the Innocence Project and the Innocence Network, and she has a podcast called Labyrinths where she talks about coerced confessions, and media bias, and generally about injustice in our court systems. Her work focuses especially on how misjudged behavior—like her own—can lead to life-altering consequences.

And I can’t help but make the comparison with the case of the Central Park Five in 1989, where five Black and Latino teenage boys were convicted of raping and killing a white jogger in New York City. 

The Central Park Five were interrogated for hours, some without parents or lawyers, and they all gave false confessions that were later proven to be coerced. They all went to jail. And then the real perpetrator was caught and convicted in 2002, 13 years later.

In both cases, there was no physical evidence linking the accused to the crime. But the Central Park Five were judged based on things they said while under enormous pressure, and, let’s face it, their skin color played a part there, too. With Amanda Knox, she was judged by how she reacted to tragedy.

These are reminders that innocence doesn’t always look the way people expect.

To those people who judge by appearance, I say, if you’re ever accused of a crime, I hope the jury is smarter than you and looks at the evidence, not whether you cry at the right time or express your grief and pain in a certain “acceptable” way.

Another thing that worked against Amanda Knox was the way that she stuck around for way too long after the murder and tried to be helpful to the police. While her friends and family were telling her that she really should get on a plane and go home, take herself to the US Embassy and get the heck out of there, she was trying to help the police. And by help, I mean that she kept talking to them.

And this just made the police more suspicious. I guess they figured, if she keeps hanging around, it must be like an arsonist that comes back to watch the building burn. But really, Amanda Knox was just a naive 20-year-old who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The timeline for the convictions and acquittals in the case of Meredith Kercher’s murder goes like this.

November 1st, 2007: Meredith is murdered. 

November 6th, less than a week later, Amanda and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito are arrested.

A couple of weeks later, on November 20th, Rudy Guede is found in Germany, and extradited to Italy to stand trial. He wants a fast trial, so less than a year later, in October 2008, Guede is convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. By the way, he eventually only serves 13 years, and now, in 2025, he’s out.

Back to Amanda and Raffaele. Their trial starts in January 2009. And the theory of what happened went something like this. 

Amanda and Raffaele watch a movie at Raffaele’s apartment around 6 PM and get really high smoking weed. Then Raffaele talks to his dad on the phone around 9 PM. Then the two of them shut off their cell phones, somehow get in touch with Rudy Guede, who doesn’t even own a cell phone, invite him over for sexy time with Meredith, who doesn’t like Rudy at all. And Amanda and Raffaele go to the house with no one seeing them, then the three of them push their way into Meredith’s room, which by the way, is so tiny and crowded with furniture that four people would have had a lot of trouble even just getting in there. Meredith doesn’t like the sex game, so Amanda kills her, and then somebody throws Meredith’s phones into the field, and Amanda and Raffaele make their way back to his apartment, again with no one seeing them, and somehow get rid of all the blood evidence on their clothes and their hair and their fingernails, like all evidence, every last scrap. And then they go to bed.

This might sound ridiculous to you and me, but in December 2009 both Amanda and Raffaele are convicted and sentenced to over 25 years in an Italian prison.

But all is not lost. Two years later, in October 2011, both are acquitted of murder on appeal. Amanda, having spent four years in an Italian prison at that point, goes back to the United States.

Then in March 2013, Italy’s Supreme Court overturns the acquittal and orders a new appeal trial.

Then in January 2014, Amanda and Raffaele are convicted again, with even longer prison sentences. But Amanda is already back in the good old U S of A, and she ain’t going back to Italy anytime soon. And the United States judicial system doesn’t make any move to extradite her. And to that I say, good for them.

Then in March 2015, Italy’s Supreme Court definitively acquits Amanda and Raffaele, declaring them not guilty, in the most final way possible. The court criticizes the investigation as riddled with "stunning flaws." 

You don’t say.

It was right before this final acquittal that I got interested in Amanda Knox’s story, and I’m so glad I researched it for my class. I learned so many things besides cell phone forensics.

The obvious lesson, of course, is don’t judge a book by its cover. But there are a few other important lessons here as well.

One is that if the police want to talk to you down at the station, only agree to talk with a lawyer present. And another is to not speak to police at all if they are forcibly keeping you up past your bedtime, or saying things like, “Just tell us the truth and you can go home.” Police can say anything they want, even if it’s a lie. So clam up and ask for a lawyer.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever help the police. They’re trying to do their job, and sometimes they just need a bit of this or that information, and that’s cool. This happened to me once, when there was a robbery in my neighborhood, and a very pleasant detective showed up. They asked to see my outdoor security camera footage, and I said, “Sure.” Since I knew nothing about the robbery, I simply told them that, and showed them the footage, which also showed nothing of interest, and the detective left. All fine and good, and I hope it all turned out well for them. But that’s a very different story than if the detective had tried to haul me downtown to interrogate me about my whereabouts when the crime occurred. In that case, I would have been like, “lawyer, lawyer, lawyer”.

And yet another lesson I learned is, if you are in a foreign country and something crazy goes down, like a murder, give your factual and unemotional statement to the police, and then get thee out of the country. If this is a problem, your local embassy should be able to help you out.

And try to keep the yoga to a minimum. No laughing or smiling. Even if you’re angry or feel like laughing or singing or whatever because that’s how you cope, try to just look solemn or sad. At least until you get home.

Oh, and one more thing. Leave your phone turned on at night. If you listened to the How Hacks Happen episode “Sneaky phone downloads,” you know that thing will secretly ping on the cell towers around your house, all over the internet all night long, but this will help cement your alibi, that you were home all night doin’ nuthin’.

Did you know the story of Amanda Knox before listening to this episode? I hope you take some good lessons from it. The judicial systems of the world are supposed to find the truth and put away criminals, but they don’t always get it right.

This is Michele Bousquet, wishing you a life free of unjust police interrogations. See you next time on How Hacks Happen.