She had only been abroad in a small town in central Italy, for a few months, as a foreign student. The babble spoken all around her was just starting to sound like something intelligible, Italian. In fact she’d started a comfortable romance with an Italian guy, and life was looking up.
Meredith Kercher
Until disaster struck.
Amanda Knox, from Seattle, shared a house with several others students, a common practice. When British housemate Meredith Kercher was found murdered, Italian authorities fixed, for whatever reason, on Amanda’s guilt in the grisly crime.
There was never much reason to believe that Knox slit her housemate’s throat, and lots of reason to believe she was not involved. But as an American free spirit, a little out of sync with her Italian town, she made a believable target. The crime, her trial(s), are all superb mystery fodder, addressed elsewhere by MindOverMystery, and we recommend above all the absorbing read which is Nina Burleigh’s “A Fatal Gift of Beauty.”
In this post, we’re marking the tenth anniversary of an extraordinary time in the life of a student abroad. Did she get an education in a foreign country, oh yeah… and how.
Perhaps for good reason, there’s almost never a statute of limitations on murder. It’s considered an offense to society, forever…and partly because the pain of surviving family never goes way.
What we don’t often think of are the accused. Do we feel their pain years later?
Amanda put her thoughts in writing on the tragic anniversary: