Letting Go of the Mysterious Amanda Knox by Susan Marie Kovalinsky

Susan Marie Kovalinski is a Writer, publicist, and blogger who once felt that Amanda Knox was guilty. In fact she felt strongly enough about Amanda's guilt to blog about it. Susan recently came across the analysis of Ron Hendry on InjusticeinPerugia.org which led Susan to believe she had made a terrible mistake. 

Letting Go of the Mysterious Amanda Knox 

by Susan Marie Kovalinsky

Like many Americans, I was initially superficially intrigued by the Knox case; with the interest increasing in depth and scope, as further details and history came to light by way of mainstream media.  

In the beginning, I merely heard news reports  -  sporadically  from 2008 on  - on cable news networks, about the young University of Washington co-ed who had been studying abroad, and was now caught in the web of an Italian murder investigation involving her British room-mate.

But then, I found my way to a blog which catapulted me into a state of well-nigh obsession.  

The name of the blog does not matter, although many will probably be familiar with it,  and guess its identity.  In any case, it was run by a very intelligent woman with a proclivity for eloquent psychological analysis.  

The facts were laid out regarding the law enforcement investigation conducted by the officials in Perugia. The idea that these facts might be merely interpretation, and subjective, had never occurred to me.  

Thus it was that I found myself in possession of certain presuppositions:

• That the crime scene was staged
• That evidence pointed to several perpetrators
• That Knox and Sollecito had failed to call the police, and had lied to the postal police about having done so
• That Knox and Sollecito had been surprised in the act of  cleaning up the crime scene by the postal police 
• That Knox and Sollecito had no alibis, and had behaved strangely, and had lied to the police 

In any case, from here one had only one thread to follow, one train of reflection in which question upon question piled up: Why? Why this young American student, why under these conditions,  what had opened the floodgates of such rage, such sexual fury in a seemingly innocuous and wholesome girl? 

From what shadows does Amanda emerge, in what way is she cipher and symbol of her generation, a child of divorce, perhaps with some neglect or abuse having been white -washed within a milieu of suburban middle class hypocrisy ----and I am afraid to say, that within this purview, Amanda became a mystery to me, almost a fetish: And my interest deepened until she was an obsession.  

Certainly, I researched her obsessively; I blogged about her, I posted pictures of her, some of which I photoshopped, adding shadows, or converting to sepia or black and white. Like a love-sick youth,  I waxed poetic on the little girl lost, the archetypal American girl, who perhaps  over-identified with her male counterparts and their Generation X (or Y?) sexuality, and through some osmosis or synthesis of cultural and personal catalysts, became the author of this most dastardly deed.

I felt Amanda was my shadow self, the girl I might have become if fate had been slightly less kind, Providence a hair less watchful.  

And then I read the Ron Hendry analysis. 

I hadn't meant to. An accidental Google trawl had led me to the fateful investigative analysis. 

At first, I was only taken aback. But as I read further, the denial mechanism was less quick to  spring into action; by the third read, it had shut down altogether. My mysterious Amanda was fading. Had she ever been real, ever been more than my own projection, perhaps of a self that came perilously close to actualization, at least in retrospect? In any event: She simply failed to withstand this last analysis: In the face of the Hendry report she went hurtling down into nothing. 

My mysterious Amanda,  replaced by one merely falsely accused.