Bad police techniques and incompetent
witnesses were the topic of discussion Monday night as Seattle
University hosted a panel on making the case for the innocence of Amanda
Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.
One of the guest speakers, Paul Ciolinio, is a well-known private investigator, based in Chicago, who works frequently with CBS’s well known show 48 Hours. In late 2007, Ciolino and the 48 hours crew flew to Perugia to investigate the death of Meredith Kercher.
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| Paul Ciolinio |
The last to speak at the event, Ciolino revealed surprising details that raise serious doubts over the competency of the police and prosecutors who investigated the murder of Meredith Kercher and the reliability of their witnesses.
“We don’t care if you’re innocent, we like a story,” Ciolino remarked during his introduction.
Ciolino spoke at length about a
discussion he had with Edgardo Giobbi, head of the Rome police squad
responsible for arresting Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. He made
the now notorious remark to a documentary crew in the movie “Sex, Lies,
and the Death of Meredith Kercher,” that “[W]e were able to establish
guilt by carefully observing the suspects psychological and behavioral
reactions during the interrogation. We didn’t need to rely on other
kinds of investigation as this method enabled us to get the guilty
parties in very quick time.” Incidentally, this determination of guilt
was made before the police had caught the actual killer, Rudy Guede, a
drifter from the Ivory Coast whose physical evidence was all over the
crime scene.
Shocking statements like Giobbi’s
illuminate the incompetent and preconceived judgments made by the
Italian police before the forensics came in. But according to Paul
Ciolino’s recollections of his encounter with Giobbi while he was in
Italy, Giobbi’s methods for determining guilt were even more absurd and
egregious than previously thought.
During the panel discussion, Ciolino
retold the story of his meeting with Giobbi during his investigation,
“Guy who arrested Amanda ‘I said to him, ‘you don’t have any physical
evidence, you don’t have eyewitnesses, you don’t have a murder weapon,
what do you got?’ Tell me…convince my why this girl did this?”
According to Ciolino, officer Giobbi
only needed to know one thing to determine guilt, “He says, ‘I’ll tell
you why…….she was eating pizza!”.
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| Edgardo Giobbi |
Ciolino elaborated, “A week after they
initially made contact with Amanda, he’s looking for Amanda and
Raffaele, and he’s got Raffaele’s cell phone, and he calls Raffaele up,
and he says ‘I want to see you and Amanda’ and Raffaele says ‘ok’. And
he says ‘where are you?’ and he says ‘we’re getting a pizza, we’re right
by the university’. He says ‘come on over’”.
For Giobbi, this event was enough to
convince him he had the right people. “And he says ‘At that moment, I
knew she was guilty.’”
“This is from the head of police…..I
knew she was guilty because if it was me, I’d be in bed curled up and
crying still if my friend had been killed.”
“I said ‘this is a week later, she’s not
supposed to eat’?.....You’re telling me she should be in bed crying?
‘Yes yes yes, that’s what I’m telling you, I knew she was guilty when
that happened. ‘ This is the case against Amanda Knox!”.
But Giobbi’s incompetence wasnt the only
revelation revealed by Ciolino. Also discussed was’ Ciolino’s
discovery that the police neglected to canvas the neighborhood near the
cottage where Meredith Kercher was murdered.
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| Apartment buildings overlooking cottage. |
“If you’re a policeman, and there’s a
murder in the house and you got a dead body there and you don’t have any
witnesses…..who do you want to go talk to to see if they’ve seen
anything?” Ciolono asked the audience.
“We call it canvassing the neighborhood
here in the states….We go over to the apartment building and I start
knocking on doors. Guess what? No policeman has ever rung a door bell
in that building. To this day, never, never has anyone been interviewed
in that building….No police officer, no prosecutor, no one ever went to
that building and rang that door bell and asked ‘have you seen
anything’?”.
Unlike the Italian police, Ciolino
actually did canvass the apartment buildings next to where Meredith
Kercher was killed. One of the people he spoke with was Nara
Capaziell’s niece. For those unfamiliar with the case, Nara Capazielli
(sometimes referred to as the “ear witness) is the woman who stated
during the trial that she heard a blood curdling scream. However, she
never bothered to call the police. Recently, Oggi Magazine, one of
Italy’s most popular and widespread newspapers, reported that Nara is
not only nearly deaf, but has also spent time in a psychiatric ward.
Paul Ciolino discussed meeting Nara’s
niece, who incidentally lived in the apartment above Nara, and confirmed
Nara’s unreliability, telling Ciolino that Nara “hasn’t been out of the
house in ten years, she’s nuts. When her husband died she lost it and
we have to take care of her and she’s mentally ill and she got
hospitalized a bunch of times and she’s nice and she’s harmless….but
she’s crazy.” Ciolino emphasized, “And this is from her niece and
nephew who live in the building and take care of her.”
Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s
case is now on appeal where independent experts are expected to testify
about their findings on May 21st.
