Why There Will Always Be Three Amanda Knoxes

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Much of the coverage was driven by the Italian media, which purvey lurid crime stories like this one in a separate section called cronache nere (literally, black chronicles). If or when Knox is released from prison, the Italian response will be the most interesting of all to watch. Italians think of her as a kind of pretty witch, a beguiler of men, whose murderous spree on the night after Halloween was only to be expected as the dark side that all hypersexualized vixens are presumed to possess. That's why the prosecutor inserted witch fear into his first statements about the murder, and that's why the Italian television networks looped and relooped endlessly a piece of video of Knox and Sollecito snuggling and kissing outside the murder house as crime-scene investigators came and went around them; and that's also why a television news program voted her "woman of the year" in 2008, ahead of Carla Bruni and Angelina Jolie.

Italy is a sunny place, but free speech there is rather chilled. The nation was ranked 79th in press freedom in 2009. Journalists who criticize Silvio Berlusconi have been fired. Prosecutors have the right to throw journalists in jail on fairly flimsy grounds. Most Italian journalists assume phones are tapped. Courageous, smart journalists are on the front lines of stories about war, the Mafia and social issues, but those who do investigative work generally don't take on the government, a function left to the judiciary, which polices itself.

Because the Italian judiciary has no public face, all journalists in Italy covering cases like the Kercher murder must rely on tips from individual lawyers. Favored reporters were handed what seemed to be everything — mountains of material that American courts would never hand off to American journalists, from audiotapes of wiretapped conversations to garish videotapes of forensic workers at the crime scene swabbing orifices — before the trial even began. Meanwhile, crucial, other potentially exculpatory information — audio or video of interrogations, for example — never emerged.

Adding to the selective information download, journalists in Italy approached the case with a casual attitude toward facts. If a lawyer said something — anything — it was broadcast or printed, subject to debate, but rarely if ever an official correction. Thus, nonexistent "evidence" — Sollecito's quest for "extreme emotions," a cherry-picked phrase from a long blog post mostly about homework and taking care of family members; his reported googling of bleach in the hours after Meredith's murder; or a parking-lot video supposedly of Amanda Knox arriving at the house around the murder hour — and scientifically incoherent memes such as "mixed blood" DNA in the bathroom Knox and Kercher shared, remained in the public record forever.

Almost two years after the murder, I was only the second journalist out of a pack of dozens on the story to go to Milan to follow an important thread on Rudy Guede, the third person convicted of murder in the case and now serving a 16-year sentence. I spoke to the owner of a nursery school where, the week before the Kercher murder, Guede was found with a knife and a computer stolen from a Perugia law office in his backpack. The police took the knife and computer and let him go — much to their regret, they told me, when they heard he was wanted for murder a few weeks later. No one had ever put much effort into trying to understand his deeply troubled psyche, his sleepwalking and fugue states, let alone understand how the crime scene at the house resembled other incidents involving the same man. Instead, the court heard and the journalists broadcast that Knox and Sollecito were involved in the Kercher murder. Such was the power and hold of the narrative's central figure — Knox — over global media.

With the exception of a Perugia blogger, few Italians ever really questioned the peculiar narrative of the crime. As the appeal ends, holes in the case — especially involving dubious material evidence — that were well known to all spectators during the first trial have finally entered the Italian consciousness. But no appeal verdict, guilty or innocent, will ever convince millions of people in three countries that the Amanda Knox they think they know might not be her at all.

Burleigh is the author of The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox (Broadway, 2011). More on the book and her work at www.ninaburleigh.com. Get updates on the Knox case on twitter @ninaburleigh.