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I encountered similar over-the-top defensiveness in my reporting of the case--the insistence, for example, of some of her supporters that Knox never tried drugs (definitely not seconded by friends of hers I interviewed, who spoke of occasional marijuana use). These inconsistencies gave rise to a sense that her friends were creating a false person. The British could imagine only one reason for that: they must have had something terrible to hide.
Americans understand that the Knoxes woke up one day to find television trucks parked outside their houses and had to figure out what to do. The family kept silent just long enough for the journalists in Europe, led by the British pack, to scour the Internet for leads. They found Knox's Web page, on which she had posted exercises in short-story writing, one of which involved a rape and self-cutting. It was not difficult then to create the Foxy Knoxy persona, a perfect fit for the prosecution's sensationalist theories.
Italy's response to the Knox phenomenon says more about gender politics and media culture circa 2009 than about whatever happened in the house on the edge of Perugia's picturesque centro district the night after Halloween 2007.
One of the strangest aspects of the case was the way the Italian prosecutor, journalists and the Italian public seemed resistant to the simplest explanation of the crime: a robbery gone wrong, committed by the man already convicted of the murder, Rudy Guede, who was born in Ivory Coast and eventually raised by a Perugia family. Almost two years after the murder, I was only the second journalist out of a pack of dozens to go to Milan to follow an important thread on Guede, the third person--after Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito--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 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.
No one had ever put much effort into trying to understand this young man's troubled psyche, his sleepwalking, his fugue states, let alone understand how the crime scene at the house resembled other episodes involving Guede. Instead he was treated as though invisible--a reflection perhaps of Italy's attitude in general toward immigrants.
Even after Guede's conviction, prosecutors and the public believed that Knox and Sollecito (whose conviction was overturned with hers) took part in the murder with him. The Italian affinity for conspiracy theories didn't help. Dietrology--literally behind-ology--is a national intellectual sport that examines controversies and sees plots everywhere. When I met Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor in the case, to talk about the Kercher murder, he often preferred to talk about a broader conspiracy involving Masons and Florentine judges. In one interview he lectured me about the naivet of Americans who don't believe Kennedy assassination conspiracies. "Why do they call it a conspiracy theory?" Mignini asked. "Why are they called conspiracy theories? Caesar was killed by more than 20 senators. Is that a conspiracy theory? It's normal that people work together."