Meredith Kercher was found dead in the flat she shared with Amanda Knox. Her throat was slit, and she had also been sexually assaulted. There were 40 knife wounds all over her body, and in Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s first trial, prosecutors claimed her death came about in a sex game gone wrong. Evidence suggested there was more than one person in the room at the time Kercher died.
Justifying the second Knox and Sollecito acquittal, the judge in the case said there were “stunning flaws” in the Kercher murder investigation, The Guardian reports. There was also no biological evidence linking Knox and Sollecito to the crime, and Knox’s motivation for committing the crime was never firmly established, the judge said. DNA evidence did put Rudy Guede at the scene.
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Referring to Knox’s first 2009 conviction, the judge wrote (via The Guardian), “The international spotlight on the case in fact resulted in the investigation undergoing a sudden acceleration, that, in the frantic search for one or more guilty parties to consign to international public opinion, certainly didn’t help the search for substantial truth.”
Guede, who lived in a flat below Kercher, denied killing her, but also said Knox and Sollecito were not involved. At Knox and Sollecito’s first acquittal trial, a witness testified that Guede confirmed their lack of involvement while in prison.
