Introduction

Abstract

On 3 November 2007, news broke of a British student, Meredith Kercher, who had been found stabbed to death in her flat in Perugia, Italy, where she was studying on a year abroad. Within a few days, the desperately sad story took on a different cast altogether when Kercher’s flat-mate and fellow student Amanda Knox, from Seattle, WA, was questioned and then arrested as an alleged participant in the crime. Kercher and Knox had been sharing a flat together on the outskirts of the town, along with two young Italian women. They had bonded well initially, but some accounts suggest that the friendship had cooled by the end of October.¹ On the morning of 2 November, officers from the Polizia Postale, a division that handles telecommunications and internet crime, arrived at the flat looking for the owners of two mobile phones that had been found discarded in a neighbouring garden. They came across Knox and her Italian boyfriend of just a week, Raffaele Sollecito, standing outside the house. The couple reported that there were signs of a break-in, and also told the officers that they had called the state police, who arrived a short time later. The locked door sealing Meredith’s room was broken down and her semi-clothed body was found on the floor in a pool of blood. She had been sexually assaulted and had bled to death from deep stab wounds to her neck.

A woman dipped in blood and talk of modesty?

Middleton & Rowley, The Changeling, 3.4.126