S3 Ep370: Meredith Kercher & Amanda Knox | The Scene That Shaped the Case (Part 2)

In September 2007, 20-year-old American college student Amanda Knox moved to Perugia, Italy to study abroad and experience life on her own. She settled into a stone villa with three other young women and quickly began building friendships with her new roommates, forming a particularly close bond with 21-year-old British exchange student Meredith Kercher. Just weeks later, on November 2, Amanda would find herself standing outside that same home as police and paramedics rushed inside. Not fluent in Italian, she didn’t fully understand what was happening - only that Meredith had been found murdered in the villa they shared. Despite having no clue what was going on, Amanda became the focus of the murder investigation within hours. And what followed would become one of the most controversial criminal cases of the modern era, marked by intense scrutiny, global media coverage, and sharply divided opinions about guilt, innocence, and how justice is pursued when the world is watching. Try our coffee! - www. CriminalCoffeeCo.comBecome a Patreon member -- > ｿ https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeeklyShop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> ｿ https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shopYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcastWebsite: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.comInstagram: @CrimeWeeklyPodTwitter: @CrimeWeeklyPodFacebook: @CrimeWeeklyPodADS:1. https://www. SKIMS.com/CrimeWeekly - Check out our favorite underwear and bras at SKIMS! After checking out, let them know we sent you!2. https://www. TryFUM.com - Use code CRIMEWEEKLY for double cores and a FREE gift with your Journey Pack!3. https://www. RocketMoney.com/CrimeWeekly - Reach your financial goals, cancel unwanted subscriptions, and more!4. https://www. WildGrain.com/CrimeWeekly30 - Use code CRIMEWEEKLY30 to get $30 off your first box and FREE croissants for life! 5. https://www. HelixSleep.com/CrimeWeekly - Get 27% off sitewide! Select our podcast Crime Weekly after checkout and let them know we sent you!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Crime Weekly. I'm Stephanie Harlow.

• 0:15Derrick Levasseur?

  And I'm Derrick Levasseur.

• 0:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, and we are diving into part two of the Amanda Knox-Meredith Kercher case. We already did part one, but for those of you who need a quick update because it's been a week, I will summarize what we talked about in part one. So in the fall of 2007, 20-year-old American college student Amanda Knox moved to Perugia, Italy, to study abroad and experience life on her own. She settled into a shared villa and quickly formed friendships with her roommates, including a 21-year-old British exchange student named Meredith Kercher. The two bonded easily. They spent time together and they adjusted to life in a new country. In the early hours of November 2nd, Amanda returned to the villa and noticed several things that unsettled her.

• 1:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  An open front door, blood in the bathroom she shared with Meredith, and feces left in another toilet in the other bathroom that the other two roommates shared. After failed attempts to reach Meredith and growing concern, police were called and soon after Meredith was discovered dead inside her locked bedroom. As detectives and crime scene investigators flooded the scene, Amanda struggled to understand what was happening. She was hampered by the language barrier and the shock of what she was witnessing. This is according to Amanda. In the hours that followed, she agreed to speak with detectives multiple times. She believed she was helping and she was unaware that the detectives were already viewing her as their primary suspect. So we're diving in here. I want to say that after we filmed last week's episode,

• 1:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  I went back and I rewatched the documentary that's on Netflix, the one that came out, I think in like 2016 or something. I don't know exactly right now, but I forgot how much. That documentary infuriated me specifically, have you seen it Derek? The Amanda Knox documentary on Netflix? No. So specifically the journalist Nick Pisa, who I believe he was working for the Daily Mail at that time and he as well as other journalists, I think he was from the UK. He came to Italy to cover this case because it was huge, sensationalized as we know. And he really, really came off terrible in that documentary. He came off terrible.

• 2:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think that they sent him because he spoke Italian or at least had a better understanding of the language than other British journalists at that time. But he was just the worst. And I think that Nick Pisa was sort of a representation of the media at that time that was covering Amanda Knox's case. Where basically Nick Pisa was like, this case was the best thing that ever happened to anybody ever. We were so excited about it. It had sex and it had this and it was just the best thing ever. And I, he said it's better than sex when you get a case like this. And he was just excited about it. And he doesn't seem to at all, number one, care about Meredith, the murder victim. He doesn't at all seem to care about Amanda.

• 3:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  He even admits, you know, that he and the other journalists at this time were just reporting by the seat of their pants. They would hear something and they would, they would print it. And he said something like, why, who has time to fact check? Who has time to fact check when all of these inflammatory sensationalized details are coming out and you want to be the first person to, to put it in the paper? And I think that this is a representation of not only how true crime is reported in the media, but how true crime is reported in general, where everybody wants to be the first person to report on this case. And they're reporting on it in the early days before really anything concrete has come out and the focus turns more to, um, who, who is this Amanda Knox person?

• 3:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  And digging into her background. And we're going to get into it, but. The thing that bothered me the most, and I'm not sure how familiar you are with this case, you probably just know the, the details and things, but we will talk about it. Amanda Knox ends up getting arrested and she, she's in prison. And while she's in prison, not only are they reading her diary, but they told her she was HIV positive, but she wasn't. They told her she was HIV positive. And when you look at it and you're like, oh yeah, police are allowed to lie to people in order to, you know, further the investigation. What was the, what was the motive for doing that? How did it further the investigation

• 4:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  to falsely tell a 20-year-old girl that she has contracted HIV?

• 4:45Derrick Levasseur?

  That's wild.

• 4:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  And to absolutely make her so devastated and, and depressed about it. Now, the Italian law enforcement, they'll say, well, we wanted to understand, you know, how, how deep like her, her sexual background went. And she started listing her, her previous sexual partners in her diary, and then they, they printed this stuff. Okay. So just really terrible reporting, unprofessional reporting and unprofessional behavior on behalf of the Italian police. So I, I just wanted to kind of get that out of the way. Nick Pisa, bad, bad news, bad guy, but he is a representation of just how terribly this case was handled and reported at the time when it was going down.

• 5:30Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, I, I wasn't familiar with that. That's diabolical to, to go there and use as a tactic. I can honestly say I've never gone that route, but to each his own. No, as far as this case overall, I'm following along with all of you guys, the ones who may have heard of the case before, but aren't familiar with all the facts. And I kind of like it that way. I like going into it with a fresh perspective and not being influenced or have any biases, you know, as we're going through it. The one feedback that I, I addressed in my voice reply on YouTube, which is a new feature, it's pretty cool, was there were some people who, who were concerned that Meredith would be lost in this story. And

• 6:11Derrick Levasseur?

  here's the, here's the reality of it. If you had said Meredith Kercher to me just in passing, I, I would have said, oh man, that name sounds familiar. And then I would have been like, oh, yes, it's connected to Amanda Knox. But to the point of everybody concerned about it, you're right. Amanda Knox has become the icon of this case. And Meredith, to a certain degree, has been forgotten. And that is why, and I responded in the comment section about it, that is why we have Meredith in the title, because with 100% certainty, she is a victim in this case. And Amanda may be a victim as well. And that's why we're discussing the case to kind of break that down and give our opinions on who

• 6:52Derrick Levasseur?

  we think is responsible for Meredith's murder. That's what it's all about. It's still, this whole case is about Meredith and what happened to her. Now, as a, as a side quest to this, we have to also look into Amanda because, as Stephanie just said, with the reporting on this, Amanda became the quote unquote star of the show. That's what it was all about. And so, yeah, we're going to approach it from that angle because that familiarity allows people who are looking for more information on this case to find it. And that is part of what we're doing here is making sure that the searchability is there. But without a doubt, you don't have to be concerned. Our focus is, is not only Amanda, but more importantly, Meredith as well, to find out who's responsible for what, what happened to her. And if there's more than one person, we want to make sure that they were held

• 7:36Derrick Levasseur?

  responsible as well. So, so trust us, it hasn't been lost on us that Meredith has, to a certain degree, been forgotten in all of this. And we're going to do our best to make sure that by the end of this episode, you know her name.

• 7:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, and Meredith's not forgotten by us, which, as I said, in, in part one, we are going to talk about Meredith in part two. Here we are in part two. Here we are talking about Meredith. So, let's talk about Meredith, who she was, who she was as a person. Meredith Kercher was born on December 28th, 1985, to her parents, Arlene and John. She was the baby of the family. She had three older siblings, John, Lyle, and Stephanie. She was known for her beautiful smile, her sparkling personality, great sense of humor. She was really, really smart. People described her as kind, caring, considerate, someone who never spoke badly about others. Like I said, she was known to be smart. She was intelligent. She also had an excellent memory. And she had a way of drawing people in instantly.

• 8:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  So growing up, Meredith shared a bedroom with her sister Stephanie. Obviously, the two were very close. From a young age, Meredith gravitated towards creative outlets. She took ballet, she sang, she loved musicals and going to live theater productions and concerts. And because her father was a journalist, which is interesting, he often had access to all of these cool shows, you know, sometimes even backstage. So in his book titled Meredith, Meredith's father, John, wrote that one highlight was getting to see Liza Minnelli perform and afterwards even getting to meet her in person. So Meredith, it was just the best time. She was in complete awe at this whole experience. And it was one that John was really happy to have been able to give her and share with her.

• 9:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, in 1997, when Meredith was 11 years old, her parents divorced. Her father, John, moved into his own place and Meredith made a point to stay close to him. So every Friday after school, she would go see him. They ate dinner together and they watched Friends. Now, Friends was a show that Meredith was completely obsessed with. Her favorite characters were Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe.

• 9:38Derrick Levasseur?

  Were you a big Friends person?

• 9:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, yes. For a time. It's not one of those shows I've rewatched. Like, I rewatched some shows. I rewatched Gilmore Girls and Vampire Diaries and The Office and stuff like that. So it's not a show that I rewatch because I don't like the laugh track. I don't like the laugh track, but I did watch it when I was young. I watched it when it was on TV. I even had the DVD box set. I will say, though, now you have daughters and they're getting to that age. I think Gilmore Girls is a fun show to watch with them. So as Meredith entered her teenage years, she developed a strong interest in fashion and shopping. And she also fell in love with Italy. She started taking Italian classes. By that point, she already spoke French and she seemed to have a natural ability for

• 10:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  learning new languages. And I always see people like this. Remember, Meredith's smart, she's a great memory. So someone like that is going to be able to pick up on new languages quickly.

• 10:32Derrick Levasseur?

  So jealous. I have enough trouble pronouncing English words, never mind learning a second language. That's crazy.

• 10:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, and she's learning a third, right? Because she speaks English, speaks French. And once you learn one language, you kind of have that, that part in your brain that allows you to pick up on, on other languages easily. But, I mean, my father spoke French. That's his native language. And he made sure, when he came to America, he, I always get mad at him. I'm like, why didn't you speak French to me? Because my aunt spoke French to my cousins, they all speak French fluently. And he was like, no, I wanted, I want you to be Americanized. Like, I wanted to be Americanized, so I didn't want to pass that on to you. And I understand where he's coming from, but also I'm a little upset because it would be cool to speak French. So Meredith's really good with picking up new languages. She loves fashion.

• 11:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  You can see Meredith, she's a beautiful, beautiful young girl all throughout when she's growing up. Of course, if she's interested in fashion, that's going to bring her to Italy. And when she was 14, after studying Italian for about a year, she went on a two-week exchange visit to southern Italy. And she loved it so much that she returned again the following summer and planned to study abroad there in college. So by the time Meredith goes to school in Italy, she's already been to Italy a few times. She's learning the language, she's picking it up. And this is a place that she's a little bit more familiar with than Amanda. In 2005, Meredith was offered a place at Leeds University, where she planned to study European politics and Italian. She wasn't completely sure what career path she wanted to follow,

• 12:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  but she considered journalism, like her father, or possibly working in the European Parliament. The one thing she knew for sure was that she wanted to spend her junior year abroad in Italy. While at university, Meredith made friends easily and stayed very close to her family. She worked at a local bar and joined several promotions agencies to earn extra money. She also appeared in a music video. In December of 2006, she celebrated her 21st birthday. Around that time, she needed to decide where she would study in Italy during the fall semester of 2007. She considered a lot of places. Outside of Perugia, she considered Rome, Milan. And after speaking with various people, she decided that Perugia's smaller size would offer a better fit for her.

• 12:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  She then applied to the University for Foreigners, which, as we know, she was accepted into. Meredith also wasn't sure how to find housing prior to arriving in Italy, so she booked a hotel for a few days and made plans to search for student accommodations once she was there. Now, when Meredith arrived in Perugia in late August 2007, she immediately fell in love with the city. She also quickly found a listing for a villa shared by two Italian women, Filomena and Laura. This villa had space for herself and another student, Amanda Knox, who was expected to arrive a few weeks later. Meredith moved into the villa on the fourth day of her stay and began settling in right away. She called her family almost every night, talking about everything that was happening.

• 13:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  She told them about meeting other English students and spending time with them. By all accounts, things were going extremely well for Meredith. She was thriving and she was loving her life in Italy, as I think everybody who knew her knew that she would. So, remember that it was October 25th. Meredith and Amanda went out and they saw that concert, and that's where Amanda meets Raffaela, and they kind of get together. And from that point on, for that following week, because that's gonna, that following week's gonna lead us right up to Meredith's murder. They're inseparable, they're together all the time. And then we know that October 31st was Halloween. That night, Amanda's boss had asked her to stop by

• 14:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  the bar restaurant that she worked at for a little bit. I guess she wasn't scheduled to work, but he wanted her to come in. And that is when Amanda had texted Meredith and she was like, "Hey, what are you doing? You wanna meet up? Do you have a costume?" And Meredith said that she did have one, but she was going to a house of a friend for a dinner. Now, that next night, which would have been November 1st, this was All Saints Day. I guess, according to the documentary and all the sources I could find, Amanda was scheduled to work that day, and this is gonna come into play. She was scheduled to work that day, but she said her boss texted her and basically said, "You don't have to come in today. You got the day off." So, she- This is on November 1st? This November 1st. Okay.

• 14:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  So, she and Rafael were like, "Oh, well, you know, she's got the day off. We're just gonna hang out at home. We're gonna smoke a little weed, watch a movie, make dinner." And they stayed the night at his house, so- Allegedly, according to Amanda, she never went back to the villa that she shared with Meredith and the other two girls on November 1st. She's just hanging out with, um, with Rafael at his house and then she spends the night. And then November 2nd in the morning, that's when she goes back to the villa.

• 15:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, can we just recap that quick because it's super important and I, and I'm doing it more for me, I guess, but November 1st, All Saints Day, she is supposed to work that night.

• 15:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm-hmm. She's supposed to work that day and her boss is like, you don't have to.

• 15:41Derrick Levasseur?

  That day, not that night. That day, but, but the boss calls her and tells her, we don't need you. And at some point, there's a communication between her and Meredith, which is extremely important, where basically Amanda is asking her what she's up to, all this stuff and she, and asking her if she has a costume. Meredith says, yes, I do, but I'm already going out with some friends.

• 16:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  She's going to a friend's dinner for, a friend's house for dinner, yeah.

• 16:04Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, and that's where the conversation ends with them? Or are we going to talk more about it? Because obviously that's significant.

• 16:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  And that, yes, that is where the conversation ends with Meredith and Amanda.

• 16:15Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, so they go their separate ways and, and Amanda ends up spending the night at Rafael's house, watching a movie, smoking some weed, eating some food.

• 16:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  And eating dinner, yes.

• 16:23Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, cool.

• 16:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  So, yes, Amanda technically was supposed to work at the bar, Le Chic. She was scheduled for like an evening shift.

• 16:31Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I would expect that to be a big, popular day there, right? I mean, All Saints Day, everyone's gonna be out eating, drinking, right?

• 16:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  But according to the case documents, she does not get a text from her boss, Patrick Lumumba, until 8:18 PM. And then she says, that the text said, you know, you don't have to come in, it's a public holiday and the bar was empty. So after that message, she stayed at her boyfriend Rafael Solcito's apartment for the rest of the night. That's the story.

• 16:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, so I was wrong, it's not a busy day, but she was, so it's obviously.

• 17:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  You'd think it would be, right?

• 17:04Derrick Levasseur?

  You would think so, but, so she was clearly scheduled to work late at night then.

• 17:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, it's a bar, yeah.

• 17:10Derrick Levasseur?

  So she, so if she didn't get the text till 8:18, maybe she's at Rafael's or, you know, we're assuming here.

• 17:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  She was at Rafael's when she got the text.

• 17:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, thinking I'm gonna have to go to work in a little bit, but then once the boss says, hey, you don't have to come in, they're like, okay, cool, we'll just stick around here.

• 17:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  Let's smoke a joint, let's watch a movie, let's make dinner. Now, what was Meredith doing on November 1st? Because we talked about it briefly in the last episode, we said she, she hung out with friends that night.

• 17:32Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that's huge. Who are these friends?

• 17:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  So on the evening of November 1st, and the police believe that Meredith was killed on the evening of November 1st.

• 17:40Derrick Levasseur?

  As do I.

• 17:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes. So she went to the home of two English friends, Amy and Robin, and then their friend Sophie joined them there as well. And the plan was simple. They were going to eat pizza and watch The Notebook together. So, you know, Meredith's over here with her friends doing basically the same thing that Amanda and Rafaela, they claim that they're doing, watching a movie, eating dinner, hanging out. So they finished eating sometime between 8 and 8:30 PM. Right in that same window that Amanda's getting a text from her boss saying, you don't have to come in. Then Sophie said that she was heading home and Meredith decided to leave at that time too. At around 8:40 PM, Meredith walked Sophie back to her place. After that, Meredith headed back towards the villa, which was only about a five minute walk from Sophie's to the villa.

• 18:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  No one heard from Meredith again after that.

• 18:27Derrick Levasseur?

  So we're assuming around, let's just say approximately 9:00 PM? I don't know how long it would take to get from where Meredith was to Sophie's house, but then you said it's only about five minutes from there. I'm assuming if they walked, it wasn't too far.

• 18:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  It wouldn't have been too far.

• 18:42Derrick Levasseur?

  So let's just be, let's just be conservative and say 20, 25 minutes. So she's home between 9, 9:05 PM.

• 18:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, that we would assume she got home to the villa, right? Because that's where she's found. So nothing happened to her on the way, but did she run into somebody on the way?

• 18:58Derrick Levasseur?

  You're taking the words out of my mouth. Like this is critical because this opens so many doors. And I don't want to sit here and get you off track of your story because we're just getting started. But there's so many possibilities here. We could do an hour episode just on these possibilities, based on all the cases we've covered. And I was actually saying to Shannon, our editor, the other day when we were just, you know, we always randomly discuss the cases we're covering currently as we're doing the edits. And I, my toolbox has grown so much since starting Crime Weekly with you because we basically have this encyclopedia of cases we've covered where we can see living, breathing examples of these weird anomalies that happened in these cases that you wouldn't expect.

• 19:42Derrick Levasseur?

  Say all that to say BTK is one that I will always remember, not only because of the entire case, but the specific incident where he was hiding in a closet of a couple that came home. He waited for the man to leave and then he killed the victim. And to me, that is so rare, but it just shows it's possible. That's just one circumstance. There could have been someone waiting at the home or one of the many possibilities, someone saw Meredith or she encountered someone on the way home who has no previous connection to Meredith. So very important that there's that window of at least, we'll just say 20 to 30 minutes where she's walking the public streets and

• 20:25Derrick Levasseur?

  anybody could have seen her and had some type of nefarious intention.

• 20:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  Or even she got back to the villa and one of the neighbors there saw her.

• 20:35Derrick Levasseur?

  Saw her walking home by herself.

• 20:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  Hey, Meredith, what's up? You want to grab a drink or something? Somebody she knew and trusted, even maybe one of the guys who lived in the basement. There was four guys down there.

• 20:43Derrick Levasseur?

  So many possibilities. That's, yeah, that's interesting because if she was in a car, it's still possible, but less likely because she's moving so fast. And how are you going to see the person in the car? Wouldn't be the first time it's happened, but less likely. But walking home alone, even though it's only five minutes, a lot can happen in five minutes. It only takes a second.

• 21:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  And from what I can tell, the distance from their friend Amy's house to Sophie's house was also pretty short. Five to 10, five to 10. Yeah.

• 21:13Derrick Levasseur?

  That's what I'm saying. Let's be conservative and just say 20 minutes. I'm sure they have a more exact time, but I'm putting her home at the villa around 9pm.

• 21:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yep, exactly. So that's where we're at now. We know that Amanda's with her boyfriend and Meredith is with her friends that night. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 21:34Derrick Levasseur?

  All right, we're back from break and my wheels are spinning and we may get to this point in the story as we get into the aftermath, right? But like one of the big questions I have right now is what did Meredith say to Sophie, Amy and Robin that night? Like when she said, hey, I'm going home. It's still relatively early. Her friends are out, right? Amanda's already asked her what she was up to. It's All Saints Day. It's a public holiday. Did she say to her friends, "Hey, I'm going home. I'm tired. I'm in for the night. I just want to be in some sweatpants and watch some TV." Or did she leave because she had plans to meet up with someone else? I have to imagine that when she said, "Hey, I'm leaving",

• 22:17Derrick Levasseur?

  there was some follow-up as far as why she was leaving. Sophie had to leave, that's fine, but why did she decide to leave as well? And I think those conversations with Amy and Robin and Sophie are going to be very important, specifically Sophie, on that walk home. You know, what was said, what did Meredith say she was up to for the rest of the night? Just running through my head right now.

• 22:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  So according to witness testimony, court records, Meredith did not say anything alarming or out of character that evening when they were at-

• 22:48Derrick Levasseur?

  Didn't say she was going anywhere?

• 22:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  When they were at Amy's place, she was quiet, pleasant, relaxed, normal. No one recalled her expressing fear, stress, or unease. She didn't mention any plans beyond going home. She didn't complain about anyone who lived at her flat. She didn't say she felt unsafe. She did not hint that she was worried about being alone later, and I mean, obviously, she wasn't worried about being alone later because they left pretty early on-

• 23:14Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 23:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  -in the night. You know, she could have stayed later and said something like, "You know, do you mind if I just stay here? I don't feel safe." She didn't say anything like that. All right. Well, then she goes and leaves with Sophie. She walks part of the way when they left Amy's apartment. Sophie later stated Meredith was completely normal. They had a conversation, obviously, but it was unremarkable, light. Meredith said she was heading home. There was no urgency, no distress, and then they had, you know, they said goodbye, but it was brief, casual, just like the kind of farewell that friends share when they're like, "Hey, I'll see you later, and I'll see you tomorrow. I'll see you at class," whatever. Yeah, she didn't express fear about anybody. She didn't mention Amanda Knox. She didn't mention Rafaeli Celacito. She didn't mention anything. She was just normal.

• 23:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I think that this wasn't something where people can say her last words were prophetic, or that somebody was like, "I could sense something was wrong." She didn't seem to feel that she was a target to be attacked by anybody, which also kind of, I think- Gives credence to the fact that Amanda Knox is innocent because if Amanda is responsible for killing Meredith, right? If Amanda and her boyfriend did this together somehow, then you'd think there'd be some motive there. There would be some arguing or tension or something that was going on between Amanda and Meredith that Meredith would find a reason to talk about.

• 24:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  You know, if there was something going on and there was tension between them and there was something that Meredith wasn't feeling right about when it came to Amanda, she would have told somebody. But there doesn't seem to have been any arguments. We know that Amanda and Meredith texted on the evening of October 31st. Amanda was like, what are you doing? You want to hang out? Meredith was like, I have plans. She, you know, sent that little X at the end of the text, like hugs and kisses kind of thing. There doesn't seem to be any animosity or any unresolved things between them. And as far as we know, they don't see each other at all on November 1st. So what could have happened between them after that text where they seem to be normal, where things are getting to the point where murder is about to happen?

• 25:22Derrick Levasseur?

  No, you're right. And just so everyone understands where I'm at right now, I'm looking at four possible scenarios and this list could expand. But the first one being she was followed home, someone saw her alone and decided to follow her to the villa. The second being the neighbors in the basement slash first floor, maybe they saw her alone. The next one being a robbery gone wrong, some other crime that took place, she just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. And then the final one, because we're here talking about it, is that somehow Amanda is connected to this and to what you just said there, from what we know, Amanda never went back to the house on November 1st. But if that falls through and that's no longer proven to be true, well, then it opens up a whole nother can of worms.

• 26:07Derrick Levasseur?

  Because if Amanda did do this, right? If she was responsible for this, it would make sense that she would say, I never went back to the house. Why would she admit that she was back there because now it implicates her? So if she is somehow responsible for this or knows who is, she's gonna say, I never went back there because it separates her from the crime. So that's my short list right now. It could expand. I'm not leaning any direction. I'm just trying to remain as objective as possible.

• 26:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, so according to what we know, Amanda was supposed to work at 10:00 PM that night.

• 26:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Which makes sense for the 8:18 text message.

• 26:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  She gets a text at 8:18. Now, let's just say Amanda maybe went back to the villa thinking she had to work and she needed to get her work clothes.

• 26:53Derrick Levasseur?

  Right.

• 26:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  Uh, she hadn't gotten the text yet. She's going home to get ready for work because she's been at her boyfriend's house and now she needs to get her clothes and then Amanda and then Meredith comes home while Amanda's there getting ready and then she gets the text saying she doesn't have to work and so Amanda and Meredith are there together. That's a possibility.

• 27:10Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I have to put it out there, right? We're not leaning in a direction. We're not trying to steer you guys a certain way, but that is a possibility.

• 27:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  What I also think might be possible is after Meredith dropped Sophie off at her home and she starts walking home, somebody sees Meredith and follows her home.

• 27:26Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, yeah, that's on my list, yep.

• 27:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  Waits until she unlocks the door and forces his in, his way in with her as she opens the door. Those are my two, this could have possibly happened right now, kind of things.

• 27:37Derrick Levasseur?

  And don't, don't forget the neighbors downstairs. You brought it up a few minutes ago. I think you have to keep that on the list, too.

• 27:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  In, in that situation, it could have been somebody Meredith knew who she felt safe with and she invited in and then that, at that point, she's attacked.

• 27:49Derrick Levasseur?

  Got to keep that on the list because there are four people living in the basement. I don't know what's going to be their, you know, their alibi for that night, but as of right now and at this point in the story, there are four male individuals who live on the first floor and may have seen Meredith come home alone. So they're on my list as well.

• 28:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, so that brings us to November 2nd, the day that Amanda discovers, you know, the weird scene at the flat. She goes home to kind of get the, the mop and then go back to Rafael's and she's there and she sees the blood and she sees the toilet and she sees that the door is, you know, kind of open and nothing raises too many alarm bells until no one can get ahold of Meredith. So at 12:51 PM on November 2nd, Amanda's boyfriend, Rafael Solcito, called the police to report a possible break-in at the villa and say that Meredith could not be located. Like we talked about in part one, around that same time, the postal police showed up at the villa after a nearby homeowner reported finding two phones, both belonging to Meredith, in their yard.

• 28:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  While the postal officers were still at the scene, a friend of Filomena's boyfriend forced open Meredith's locked bedroom door and inside Meredith was discovered dead.

• 29:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  We need to understand this was an incredibly, incredibly bloody scene. This was not something that, I mean, you can see from the pictures, there's blood on the walls, there, that looks like handprints, like smearing blood down the walls. Very bad, bloody, violent scene. Everyone was ordered out of the house and then they waited outside for the investigating police to arrive. The first responding detective to the scene later spoke to author John Folian and said that after she showed up at the house, she was immediately suspicious of Amanda and Rafael. She said they were standing apart from the others and they were, quote, "giving each other little kisses and caressing each other," end quote.

• 29:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  The detective thought this was super off-putting as she went into the house to look around. So, we're going to show you a little clip of this now. This is Amanda and her boyfriend outside the flat after Meredith's body's been discovered. This is how they were acting and this is what allegedly the responding detective found to be incredibly suspicious.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Well, he, he kissed me because I was outside in that courtyard and I was standing there looking lost and he felt bad for me. He kept close to me and was just trying to comfort me and there was nothing he could say.

• 30:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I know this is kind of like my blanket statement, but when I watched that video, I don't put too much stock in it. People react differently in traumatic situations and there have been numerous times in my personal life where I've seen two people reacting a certain way and I'm like, that's, that's weird, that's not how I would react, but as far as the investigation's concerned, I'm not putting too much weight into what I just saw.

• 30:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, so I think that the first responder, the first police detective on the scene, finding this to be odd behavior, that's odd to me. First of all, Meredith and Amanda have known each other a very, very short time. Second of all, Amanda's going to be shocked just by the fact that this, the person she's been living with, her roommate, someone she knew, is dead. And aren't Italians all about like, love and amore? And why would they find it to be weird that two people, a couple, are using physical affection and physical touch to comfort each other in, in the aftermath of a trauma, a shock? I think that's perfectly normal. There's nothing disrespect. They're not sitting there making out, they're not groping each other, they're not like taking

• 31:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  each other's clothes off about to throw down and, you know, one of those get a room situations. This is very, you know, innocent, sweet, just like comforting behavior that I would not think that anyone who was of an Italian culture would find to be odd. And yes, is she sobbing? Is she throwing herself down on the ground? No, but once again, we have to remember, Amanda did not know Meredith that long. It's somebody she knew, but I think at this point, it's more of a shock of, somebody I knew is dead and not like, oh my God, this lifelong friend I have is gone and she's been murdered and I'm absolutely distraught. I wouldn't expect Amanda to be absolutely distraught. I'd expect her to be more kind of in a moment of like, I can't believe this is happening. I'm shocked.

• 32:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  And yes, Raffaele, who hasn't known her that long either, a week, he's not going to know the things to say to her, to comfort her, because he doesn't really know her that well. All he's going to be able to sort of default to is, let me hold you, let me kiss you, let me touch you and, and comfort you in that way. I don't find anything odd about this at all.

• 32:23Derrick Levasseur?

  No, I'm with you. I'm not putting too much weight into it. What I am putting weight into is something you said right before we watched that clip, which was a reminder from what you said in part one, which is that Filomena's boyfriend had to break down Meredith's door because it was locked. And we talked about why the door would have been locked and how they probably all locked their rooms individually. But here's why that's so important. We were talking about different possibilities regarding who the suspect could be. And when you start to take the template of a random act of violence where someone had followed her home, but maybe didn't know her previously. To me, when you apply the evidence that we have at the crime scene, it becomes less likely. Why?

• 33:06Derrick Levasseur?

  To me, the door being locked suggests some level of familiarity. Because when you take the example that you gave of someone following her home and as soon as she unlocks the door, kind of basically rushing her and going into the apartment. My belief would be if that were the case, whatever happened to her would have happened right on that living room area there, the common area where the couch is. They're going to attack her, they're going to bring her into the house or the villa, and they're going to attack her right there in that living quarters. The fact that she made it back to her bedroom, which would only be known by people who have been in that apartment before, a random stranger would not know that's her room. And yet, they bring her into the apartment. She ends up in that room.

• 33:51Derrick Levasseur?

  And then on the way out, after committing this heinous act, the offender, who has no previous connection to her, locks the door again because that's something that's normal for the people who live there, which they wouldn't know. And then also, even though they don't know if anyone else is going to come home because, again, they would have no familiarity with the place, they decide to ransack other rooms so that when someone does come home, they don't assume that it's someone connected to Meredith directly. It could be a random act of violence. These are not the behaviors of someone who had no previous connection to this house. It seems extreme to go to these measures if you're in and out because if that person had never been there before, let me reiterate that.

• 34:36Derrick Levasseur?

  They don't know if someone's coming home. They don't know if those other three rooms are residents that are going to be coming home in the next five minutes. Or if they're already home. Or if they're already in their room, but yet they had the, they felt safe enough to either before the act, which they couldn't have done it beforehand because Meredith would be free to escape. But after the act, rummage through the house and ransack the house and make it look like a robbery. Possibly. And you potentially use the bathroom without any concern that someone was going to walk in. Now, some of you may push back and say, well, maybe they were there and that's When Amanda came home and that's when everything went down, but even if that were the case, the other pieces that I just laid out for you don't make sense. They wouldn't know where Meredith's

• 35:18Derrick Levasseur?

  room was and they wouldn't know to lock the door. So to me, as we start to put these different possibilities of who's responsible for this through the filters of the crime scene itself, some of them are going to be more, some of them are going to fit better than others. And I do think when you think about a random act of violence with someone who had no previous connection to Meredith, becomes less likely when you start to examine the evidence at the crime scene as it is. It still doesn't rule out the possibility that it was a neighbor from downstairs or someone who had been at the apartment, maybe even once or twice before, but to think it was just some random person who saw Meredith walking home alone and rushed her as she opened the door. I think based on the crime scene itself, that does go to the bottom

• 36:03Derrick Levasseur?

  of my list, at least as of right now.

• 36:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  So what you're saying is this would have to have been somebody that Meredith knew and invited in and they went to her bedroom together and she's literally telling them or they're seeing just from context clues, my roommates aren't home tonight. Nobody's here. Now, I don't, I don't really understand even in that scenario, how that person would still be there when Amanda was there the next day. They would be long gone. The police believe that Meredith was killed on the evening of November 1st. Amanda's there, you know, on November 2nd and why would they stay the entire night? If Meredith's dead, why would they do that? So that wouldn't make any sense, but.

• 36:43Derrick Levasseur?

  And it doesn't have to be someone who had like a previous relationship with Meredith. It could have been someone who was there for another person and just remembered the layout and how they operated and that they locked their doors. Just someone, again, key word, familiarity, not necessarily a personal relationship, but I believe whoever is responsible for this is based on the crime scene is someone who has been there before and knew the scheduling of the other people living there.

• 37:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, it would have to be somebody who was there with Meredith when she got home. And she unlocked her door with the key because they would have to see that she used a key to unlock it and they would have to know where that key was so that when they left they could re-lock it.

• 37:22Derrick Levasseur?

  But here's the thing, right? Depending on the lock itself, they may not necessarily need the key. So if it's one of those doors where it is a key lock, but you can push the button from the inside and then shut the door and it stays locked, that could also be possible where because this person knew that these doors locked from the inside, they were able to lock it and then leave. But then that even raises another question, right? If you're just some random person who doesn't really care when people come home and what they find, why are you going to try to create a bigger gap of her discovery? Why would you take the time to lock that door to create a bigger level of separation in time from when the crime occurred and when she's discovered? Why is that necessary?

• 38:04Derrick Levasseur?

  At that point, you go in, you do what you did, and then you leave as fast as possible. There's no need to stage the crime scene because you don't really care at that point. But someone took the time to lock that door so when people returned, it would take longer before she was discovered, creating a bigger window in which the crime could have occurred.

• 38:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  So from what I can tell, this was not a doorknob that had a lock from the inside. It could only be locked and unlocked with a key, so...

• 38:33Derrick Levasseur?

  But hear me out, Stephanie. You go in your room, right, at the end of the night, like you're Meredith, and you want privacy. You can lock your door from the inside so people can't come in without a key. So it's very hard for me to believe that if you're inside your bedroom, there's not a way of locking that door without using the key. Every door with a key on it, you can still go inside your room and lock said door so people can't come in, right? Am I wrong?

• 39:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  But you're asking me, was there a button on the door from the inside where you could lock it? There was not.

• 39:05Derrick Levasseur?

  Or something, or a twist knob, or something where you could lock the door so people can't come in and barge in on you while you're changing.

• 39:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, there was not. It was one of those old European-style locks that can only be locked with a key.

• 39:14Derrick Levasseur?

  With a key.

• 39:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now here's the thing, Amanda had a key to Meredith's room.

• 39:20Derrick Levasseur?

  Right.

• 39:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  So.

• 39:21Derrick Levasseur?

  But Meredith would have had that key as well.

• 39:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  Meredith would have a key to her room, but Amanda also had a key to Meredith's room. She told the police this early on.

• 39:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay.

• 39:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Uh, Meredith had a key to Amanda's room. Uh, Amanda had a key to Meredith's room.

• 39:34Derrick Levasseur?

  So obviously not a good look. Let's just call it what it is, but it's also possible that whoever had this familiarity knew that Meredith had a key. Maybe the key was on her persons and they took that key and locked the door, but it's still, everything I said is applicable here. Why did this person feel it was necessary to lock the door on the way out?

• 39:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  So it would be longer before her body was found and they'd have more time to get away.

• 39:57Derrick Levasseur?

  Exactly. It's a bigger window of when the crime could have occurred. And why would you be concerned about that? If you have no previous connection to this residence?

• 40:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, true.

• 40:07Derrick Levasseur?

  BTK wasn't locking the door on his way out.

• 40:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  Not always, no.

• 40:10Derrick Levasseur?

  You know, it's like you do, you go in there, you do what you gotta do and it's, you leave a horrific crime scene behind, but there's a sense of urgency because if you have, if you've never been there before and you see multiple bedrooms, then you don't know.

• 40:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  You don't know which one is hers. I agree.

• 40:26Derrick Levasseur?

  You don't know which one is hers, but you also don't know when the other people are gonna come home.

• 40:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Or if they're even there.

• 40:31Derrick Levasseur?

  If they could be sleeping in that room, right? So even if you check the rooms before you do whatever you're gonna do, there's still a potential, it's early in the night, potentially that someone's gonna come wandering in with their, you know, friends or family and they're gonna walk in on whatever you're doing. So the fact that it happened in Meredith's room specifically and the door was locked after the fact, that, that to me doesn't completely rule it out, but makes it less likely that this was some random stranger who happened to spot Meredith on the road.

• 41:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, yeah, I get you. I get, I completely do get that. That's, that's really valid. We gotta keep that in mind.

• 41:07Derrick Levasseur?

  Doesn't lean towards anyone, but I'm just saying, we have to start prioritize, maybe what is the most likely scenario based on the crime scene?

• 41:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  So we've got the first responding detective getting there. She goes inside and she started by examining Filomena's bedroom. Remember, this is where the window was broken. She found clothes and personal items scattered across the floor and then a rock roughly the size of a human head lying near a chair, partially wrapped in a paper bag. There were shards of broken glass from the window that were lying on top of the scattered clothes, not beneath them. Now to the detective, that suggested the room may have been ransacked before the window was broken. Or maybe Filomena was just messy.

• 41:49Derrick Levasseur?

  I mean, it's a pretty good observation.

• 41:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, or Filomena just had a messy bedroom. I don't know, we're gonna have to find out from Filomena whether that's what her bedroom looked like. Now, it's important to note that the rock matched other rocks found outside the home. So, maybe is somebody breaking in? Or are they staging it to look as if somebody broke in? That's what the detectives are gonna be faced with.

• 42:10Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, I mean, it kind of aligns with the door, right? When you think about it, if someone was there and they're trying to create a different idea of what happened, you lock Meredith's door, you ransack the other rooms, and then once you get outside the house, you cover a rock with a paper bag so that you don't get your fingerprints on it, you throw it through the window, and you dump her phones over the fence, and then you take off. So now there's this, this idea that, oh no, this was a robbery gone wrong. They started in Filomena's room, and then they went down to Meredith's room while she was sleeping. That's what you're trying to create. That's what you're trying to at least show them.

• 42:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  So as that detective looked around, she saw glass fragments resting on the windowsill itself. She thought that if the rock had been thrown from outside, the glass should have fallen inward onto the floor. Furthermore, the rock should have shattered the exterior shutters before ever reaching the window, but the shutters were undamaged. So what do you think about that? It's kind of making it sound like they think maybe the glass was broken with the rock from the inside.

• 43:07Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm not really following the detective on that one. On one hand, I can understand the rock being on top of the clothes, which wouldn't align because you would expect the rock to go through the window first, and then the clothes to be thrown on top of the rock. But the shutters, from what I'm seeing from all the crime scene photos, and it looks like there's a couple here that still have the law enforcement placard in the window, it appears to me at least that the shutters were already open. So whether someone was on the inside throwing the rock at the window, or from the outside throwing it through the window. I wouldn't expect those shutters to be damaged unless I'm not following it and if I'm not ever anyone in the comments can feel free to correct me.

• 43:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, because I believe you could open those green shutters from the outside, those green wooden shutters from the outside and then there's like two glass window panes on the inside that would close.

• 43:58Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  And yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

• 44:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Maybe they're referring to there might be a safety measure on that shutter where you can lock it so it doesn't swing open. And maybe they found that most of the time those shutters were closed in their investigation and they didn't understand how the shutters would have been open and not damaged if you open them from the outside, right? Like if there's a locking mechanism only on the inside, how would someone open those shutters or pry them open from the outside without damaging them and then throw the rock through the window?

• 44:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, let's keep going into her findings and see if it becomes more clear because there were other details that stood out to the detective. She noticed that the broken window pane was missing glass only along the lower portion. The upper section of the glass remained intact without any fracture lines extending downward and the window itself sat about 12 feet above the ground, which would make it an unlikely point of entry, right?

• 44:56Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that's high, 12, 12 feet.

• 44:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  You're not, you're not opening the shutters from, from up there.

• 45:02Derrick Levasseur?

  I wasn't thinking about that, that we had already talked about the fact that there was the door on the level, but then it drops off.

• 45:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes.

• 45:08Derrick Levasseur?

  And so that window being on the side like that, especially from these pictures we can see now, I was envisioning it being ground level.

• 45:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:16Derrick Levasseur?

  That would not be the point of entry that a robber or some other criminal trying to get inside is going to choose to break into the house.

• 45:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, so I'm looking at these pictures from the outside and from the interior pictures when they're taking them and showing the, the outside from inside, it does look like it's kind of ground level because you can see, uh, you can see a car, you can see grass. But then if you look at the outside pictures, you can see that the house is, is on a slope like we talked about.

• 45:41Derrick Levasseur?

  Yes.

• 45:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  And so the, the place where the cars would park would sort of be on level with the window. However, the ground that slopes down underneath the window is 12 feet below that window. I don't see who's getting in that way unless they're Spider-Man. There's nothing you'd have to use a ladder. There's no way you could climb up there.

• 46:01Derrick Levasseur?

  There are a couple of images that I see online where they've replicated it and it is possible if tall enough, there's a window below Philomena's window where you could use that window to scale up the wall by putting your feet in like the grid of the window and then open Philomena's window. So it is possible without a ladder, but it seems like all of this, when you think about it from a logical perspective, if you're going to attack this house, think about how many things can go wrong, how much noise you're going to create to alert the people on the inside. And if the male individuals on the first floor were home, I would like to think they would have heard someone kicking on their window as

• 46:45Derrick Levasseur?

  they're using it as a ladder. So there's a lot of variables here that are unnecessary risks that would only be applicable to someone who's trying to surprise whoever isn't inside. And again, I'm going to beat this with a dead horse, but if this person is a complete stranger, how do they know that that window belongs to Philomena who's not inside her room at that time as you're breaking in? You would have to know who's inside that house at that time.

• 47:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, because there's other ways, there's other access points.

• 47:15Derrick Levasseur?

  Correct.

• 47:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  To this house that were lower that you could have thrown a rock through the window and gotten in. But if you have a target here and you know where you're going and you know who's in that house and you know where they're located in regards to the outlay of this house. Yeah, you could have gotten in to that lower window and gone in there, but then you'd be in a place you might not want to be. So they knew where they were.

• 47:36Derrick Levasseur?

  You might not want to be. You've got four guys in there. Yeah. And also, if you're trying to be quiet, you throwing a rock through the window is going to alert anybody inside. So if that's what happened, right? If Meredith is inside the apartment and she's alone, sleeping, sitting on the couch, whatever it might be, if she hears a rock go through the window, I would like to think she would wake up. We'd have to, we'd have to again, create an experiment to see if you would hear that rock going through the window from her room. But at that point, her door would have been locked if she's sleeping and you would imagine that. That person would have had to break down her door to get inside her room. So if you're going to create noise regardless, why wouldn't you just shoulder the front door and go through the front door and get in that way?

• 48:19Derrick Levasseur?

  It doesn't make sense to go through this window. It would create too much noise. You're going to alert the people on the inside. And at that point, your plan's out the window. So yeah, the whole rock through the window thing, it becomes more suspicious as you break down the specifics of this house.

• 48:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  So I think we can both agree. We do not think that Philomena's window was the point of entry.

• 48:38Derrick Levasseur?

  I do not believe that. No.

• 48:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  I don't either.

• 48:39Derrick Levasseur?

  I do not believe that. I think it was an afterthought to create the illusion that something else happened. The question is why?

• 48:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  And that's what the police believe as well, that this was staged.

• 48:48Derrick Levasseur?

  I think that's, I think that's fair. I think the rock being on the ground above the clothing. I also think the, the, the way the window, the, the access point to get to it, it's too much of a stretch for me anyways.

• 48:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes. All right. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 49:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, we're back. So as the detective finished looking around Philomena's room, another detective arrived at the scene. And so the first detective shared her concerns and said she believed that a break in had been staged. Then the detectives walked down the corridor towards Meredith's locked bedroom. Inside, they found blood on the door handle, the walls, the wardrobe, the floor. Meredith's body was lying between the bed and the wardrobe with a beige duvet over her. Meredith's left foot was protruding from beneath the duvet and two receipts lay on top of the blanket. So when the duvet was pulled back, Meredith was found lying on her back with her head in a pool of blood. She was naked except for two shirts that had been pulled up above her chest.

• 49:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  Her right arm was stretched outward while her left arm was bent at the elbow with her hand positioned close to her head. Her legs were spread apart with her right leg bent at the knee at roughly a 100 degree angle and rested on the edge of the quilt. The left leg was extended and resting on the floor. On the floor near her right foot were black underwear and a white bra. The bra was stained with blood particularly along the right strap and the upper outer area of the left cup. The left shoulder strap had been severed and the fabric and metal clasp from the back had been cut off and were missing. A pair of Levi's jeans lay partly under the quilt smeared with blood around the back, the right back pocket. So.

• 50:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  The clothes found on Meredith and on the ground near her actually matched what she wore to her friend's house that same, well, on November 1st. So, we know that those were her clothes.

• 50:44Derrick Levasseur?

  She's in the same clothes from the first, which would align with her being attacked that night before going to bed.

• 50:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes. So, near Meredith's head detectives found a blue hot water bottle and a pair of brown leather boots. On the bed was a towel heavily soaked with blood, a sock, a beige fake leather handbag with a sock looped around its handles, a large notebook, and a bloodstained Italian history book. A second white purse was found on the floor. On the desk to the right of the window sat an empty container of Vaseline, a laptop, a notebook, and another Italian history book. To the right of the door several beauty and hygiene products had been knocked over on a wooden shelf. So, the detectives exited Meredith's bedroom and went into the small bathroom she had shared with Amanda, and there they saw a

• 51:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  large blood stain on the tap above the sink. Blood stains were also visible on the light switch, and on the bath mat was a footprint that appeared to be a mix of blood and water. So, this is interesting because remember Amanda goes in on November 2nd and she says she saw like some blood spattered here and there, and then she didn't see a larger blood stain on the bath mat until after she got out of the shower, which might explain why there was, you know, water in, in the blood. But, they're saying that there's a large blood stain on the tap above the sink, kind of suggesting that this would have been something that should have raised more alarm in Amanda on November 2nd.

• 52:11Derrick Levasseur?

  It's possible she missed that. I'm giving her the pass on that. There are bigger things, but it's possible, you're not expecting to see those things, you could have missed it.

• 52:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  So, then Laura's bedroom was also searched, and one drawer was found to be open and ransacked. It was also determined that the home's washing machine had been recently used because damp towels and clothing were found inside. So at this point detectives didn't know much about what happened aside from the fact that Meredith had been found dead inside a bedroom that could only be locked from the outside with her key, which was missing from the scene. So Meredith's key, not there.

• 52:48Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay.

• 52:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  The detectives later told author John Folian that they questioned who would take the time to lock the door after the attack and why someone would cover her body with a blanket. I do remember the, the lead detective in this case saying like, a man wouldn't do that. A man wouldn't cover the body. Only a woman would do that. I don't believe that that's the case. We've seen many cases where, where bodies are covered and, and men are the perpetrators of that. It's usually more of a sign of shame, like you are ashamed of what you've done. You're trying to hide it. It can even be a sign that there is some relationship between the victim and the perpetrator and they were trying to preserve some sort

• 53:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  of modesty and privacy for the victim. And that's why they covered their body after. But I've never heard it said that like, oh, men don't do this because that's true.

• 53:44Derrick Levasseur?

  No, no, that the, the, the gender specific actions, I'll, I'm good on that because there's anomalies, right? We talk about cases all the time and people do things for different reasons. The one thing that you said, and there was a lot, but one thing that stood out to me that's a little contradictory is what you were describing to me, especially with the damage to the bra, things of that nature, it would indicate a sexual assault, right? Some type of struggle that went on where, where Meredith fought back. But then you have other things where it looks like someone used a towel to clean, clean up the scene or to clean up themselves. And you have to assume some of that blood came from Meredith as well. I saw.

• 54:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  I would assume all the blood came from Meredith.

• 54:27Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, came from Meredith. I'm saying that wrong, but originated from Meredith, but maybe even from her body? Did they clean her with the towel as well? Was, was this all blood that transferred on to the suspect that they were wiping off of themselves? And if they did that, I mean, what type of DNA did they find on that towel? Like it would have been from the suspect as well. So that's something that I'm thinking about. But yeah, there's, it's, it's. It does seem like this scene was staged because the evidence doesn't support one specific act, right? There's multiple crimes being demonstrated in these different rooms, which is why you you get to the conclusion of a staged scene because they don't align.

• 55:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  You mean, did they come in to assault Meredith and then they tried to make it look like they were committing a robbery?

• 55:11Derrick Levasseur?

  A robbery gone wrong.

• 55:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  Or did they come in to commit a robbery, found Meredith there and decided to assault her and then also continue rifling through the home? You're saying it's probably the main reason they came was to assault Meredith and they tried to make it seem like somebody came in and broke in after?

• 55:27Derrick Levasseur?

  Or even option number three, someone is there with Meredith, either they're they're welcome to be there, or they live there, or whatever the case may be. And during that evening, something goes wrong. She could have invited someone over, where it could have been a male counterpart that came over to her room, they were spending the night in the room, they wanted to do more, she wasn't into it, and it went from a friendly encounter and it turned violent. And it led to this, and that person had to get out of there. I think with the scenario that we have right now, from what we know, it's very possible that she had someone come over who she did know, who was going to spend the night because she knew maybe Amanda wasn't coming home. And that person was aggressive, wanted to go further, Meredith refused, and it turned violent and it resulted in her death. And

• 56:12Derrick Levasseur?

  in the process of leaving, because this person knew that nobody else was coming home that night because Meredith had already told them that, they decided to ransack the place a little bit more and make it look like a robbery gone wrong, in case somehow someone saw this person leaving the scene, they could now say, oh, yeah, I was there, but I left early and whatever happened to her must have happened after I left.

• 56:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  Maybe, maybe, but the DNA-

• 56:38Derrick Levasseur?

  That would also be the reason to lock that door, by the way. You're creating that bigger window.

• 56:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, well, yes, I think that they would, anybody would want to create a bigger window, just so they can say, I need space between me and the scene.

• 56:48Derrick Levasseur?

  I bet you that key is somewhere around there. If the law enforcement didn't find it, that key is, that key's still near that property, or was still near that property, for sure. They wouldn't take it with them, that implicates them into the crime.

• 56:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, because the detectives also were trying to understand why Meredith's two phones had been taken and then later discarded in a nearby garden. So if you're getting rid of evidence as you're kind of fleeing the scene, why would you hold on to the key?

• 57:09Derrick Levasseur?

  No, the key got tossed as well. So what happens is you have the phones, right? We're lucky enough to have found those. Unfortunately, wherever the key was tossed, which is a much smaller item, no digital trail, they just weren't able to find it. It could have been washed away, it could have been buried in a little pile of soil. It could have been in the grass. We don't know. There's a million possibilities.

• 57:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  Could have put it in a sewer or something, yeah.

• 57:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Correct, correct. But I would bet with a high degree of certainty that that key was dumped right after the phones were, or right before.

• 57:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  But if you don't want people to find the phones, why wouldn't they be in the same place as the key? Or why wouldn't you just throw them in one of the many like waterways that are around this area? So that they're not being found?

• 57:47Derrick Levasseur?

  It doesn't make sense, but if criminals were smart, they wouldn't get caught. That you, in that moment, you're realizing what's going on, you're trying to cover your tracks as best as you can, you're not always making the right decisions.

• 57:57Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, if it wasn't Amanda Knox, this criminal did not get caught.

• 58:00Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, yeah, so they got lucky then.

• 58:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  All right. So the detectives exited the villa. That's when they go to speak with Amanda, Rafael and Filomena, Filomena's boyfriend and his friend. Now, according to the detectives, everyone appeared visibly upset. Well, everyone except Amanda and Rafaela, they were standing apart from the others, still kissing and caressing each other. When questioned, Amanda reiterated what happened earlier that morning. She told the detectives she returned to the villa around 10 a.m. to shower and pack. She said she noticed the front door was open and saw blood in the bathroom she shared with Meredith. After taking a shower, she went into the larger bathroom and found feces left in the toilet. She got freaked out and decided to leave. She went to Rafaela's and they returned together, later calling the police. When Amanda was done giving her statement,

• 58:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  the detectives told her that her account didn't make any sense. They said she should have realized much sooner that something was wrong. On that note, If this was Amanda responsible for Meredith's death, why would she have gone back to the villa at all? If she said that she and Raphael were planning to leave for the weekend, she could have just said they left from his house, that she didn't need to go back and pack and get clothes. She, you know, had what she was wearing and they were going to be gone for a few days and maybe she would buy stuff. Why would she go back to the villa at all and put herself there?

• 59:18Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, or why would she, why would she have to add that to her story if she was responsible? I think the simple explanation is she's concerned that there's going to be evidence that was left behind that would indicate she had been at the property. So by re-entering that apartment, whether it's a footprint or DNA or trace evidence, she can now say, yeah, I went back there for the broom. Of course my DNA is going to be there. Of course it's going to show that I rummaged through things that may had blood on it because I went there after the fact. So she has to put herself back there if, if she's involved.

• 59:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay. Well, I mean, she lives there. So they might find evidence that she lives there. They might find her DNA and stuff there anyways.

• 59:55Derrick Levasseur?

  Hypothetically though, let's say there's blood on the ground and then you have a footprint or a handprint that comes back to Amanda Knox after the fact. That would show that her hand entered that pool of blood at some point. She can always say now, and obviously that didn't happen, but she could say, oh yes, you know, I must have missed that spot or I touched it not knowing it, what it was. So now it gives her an excuse as to why there would be evidence of her being there after the murder occurred.

• 1:00:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, okay. So, or maybe, you know, she took a shower. Let's say she committed this murder. She took a shower after to clean the evidence and then realized, oh, the water bloody footprint. I better, you know, make a, making it a reason of why I was here showering.

• 1:00:33Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. Or it's exactly what she's saying, right?

• 1:00:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes.

• 1:00:37Derrick Levasseur?

  As, as quote unquote suspicious it may be, it's, it's an unfortunate set of circumstances for Amanda Knox and she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

• 1:00:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  So the detectives tell Amanda, listen, your story doesn't make sense. Based on what we just saw, you should have known something was wrong much sooner. And then after that, the detectives stepped away. Shortly afterward, Raphael approached one of them and said, quote, "My girlfriend has just remembered that when she went into the big bathroom on her own this morning, there was excrement. When we went back to the flat, it wasn't there anymore," end quote. So the first detective on the scene then returned to the villa and checked the larger bathroom shared by Philomena and Laura. And contrary to what Raphael had just said, the feces was still there in the toilet. And so the detective was puzzled.

• 1:01:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Wait, the poop is still there?

• 1:01:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  The poop is still there, yes.

• 1:01:25Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, so that whole, you pulled the bait and switch from episode one?

• 1:01:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  Hmm, well.

• 1:01:29Derrick Levasseur?

  It is still there.

• 1:01:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  It is still there.

• 1:01:31Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, alright.

• 1:01:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  The detective was puzzled and unsure why Amanda thought it had been flushed. Or, you know, why you wouldn't have flushed it, I guess. You know, if you saw that and you didn't think anything was wrong, why would you have left it there? If it's my house or I'm sharing an apartment, if I see it, I'm gonna be like, ah, who did this? Like, this sucks. And I'm gonna flush it. I'm not going to leave it there.

• 1:01:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I get what you're saying. If I see it and my kids are guilty of it, for sure, I don't go to them and say, hey, can you go flush the toilet? Like you said, if you see it, you flush it. And if she doesn't think anything's wrong at that point, if she sees number two in the bathroom, she's gonna flush it.

• 1:02:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, she might be like, ah, I'm a little frustrated and annoyed that somebody did this, but I'm not going to leave it here for someone else to find.

• 1:02:14Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm not gonna go track down the person who did it.

• 1:02:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I'm not gonna wait until all my roommates are home and then walk them into the bathroom and say, who's responsible for this?

• 1:02:20Derrick Levasseur?

  And at this point, you're gonna assume it was a woman, so it's even more embarrassing to bring it up to them, like, hey, did you drop a huge deuce in the toilet? You're just gonna flush it.

• 1:02:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, so she didn't flush it, but then she claimed that it had, that she did flush it, but she didn't.

• 1:02:34Derrick Levasseur?

  I cannot believe this is such a big part of the story, but here we are.

• 1:02:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  I know, here we are. However, now you'd think they have this, this human waste that they can possibly test, right?

• 1:02:44Derrick Levasseur?

  Yes.

• 1:02:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay.

• 1:02:46Derrick Levasseur?

  Don't tell me they flushed the toilet.

• 1:02:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  I'm not gonna tell you anything yet.

• 1:02:48Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, okay. The detective walks in and goes, meh. Flushes it.

• 1:02:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  The detective walks in and is like, only an American would leave this here and flushes it.

• 1:02:57Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm waiting for you to tell me that it was one of the investigators that were there and had to go and use the bathroom. That's honestly would not be surprising to me at all, but I'm gonna shut up.

• 1:03:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  And there's actually pictures of this, so they did, they did take pictures of it. We know that, alright?

• 1:03:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh God.

• 1:03:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  I know.

• 1:03:12Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay.

• 1:03:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  So by that point prosecutor Giuliano Menini had been called to the scene to help investigate. And this is the guy you see in the Amanda Knox documentary. He's a big guy, kind of receding hairline, big Italian guy. He was very vocal about this case. And while he was still outside, he looked up at the broken window in Filomena's room and said, it seemed unlikely that someone had broken in that way, which he agrees with you and I.

• 1:03:38Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  So the window was too high for someone to easily scale the wall and the wall itself was in full view of anyone on the street. He thought there were other points of entry that could have made more sense. Now, there is a video on YouTube of a guy climbing that wall and showing that he can easily get to the window. And in the, in that video, the person who's guiding him through this, they said, hey, the window shades, the, the blinds, the green ones on the outside. The shutters, they were closed. How easy would it have been for you to climb up there and open them? And he said, well, pretty easy. And then he showed them how he did that. And I guess this guy was like a trained mountain climber and they were like, well, okay, you're, you're trained in climbing things, but if somebody wasn't, would, would it still have been easy for them?

• 1:04:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  And he said, yes, I think it would have been.

• 1:04:25Derrick Levasseur?

  It's not a matter of it would be easy or not. If you're casing the house and you're looking for points of entry, you're not going to choose that location.

• 1:04:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  Because it is in full view of the street.

• 1:04:34Derrick Levasseur?

  It's too much of a risk. You have to use the window below you to get in. There could be someone that could hear you there. You're going to cause noises as you're trying to get through the shutters in the window. By the time you get into the window, someone's going to be waiting there with a baseball bat for your head. So it just, it's too much of a risk. It's almost safer.

• 1:04:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  And you're crawling up with that big rock in your hands?

• 1:04:55Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, it just, it doesn't make sense. And, and listen, if it would be safer to just go to the front door and run through it, because at that point, there's the element of surprise. By the time they hear the bang. You're already inside the apartment, right? So if you're gonna do that, if that's the approach you're going with, you mule kick the door. Do you know what mule kicking doors is?

• 1:05:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  I, well, you put your back to it and then...

• 1:05:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Exactly. Yeah, you put, yeah, you put your back to it. That's how we would kick in doors a lot of the times.

• 1:05:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  You can do it, put your back into it, yeah.

• 1:05:21Derrick Levasseur?

  Put your back into it, yeah. And then you'd mule kick it, because you can get a lot more power that way. You mule kick that thing and you're within 30 seconds, you're inside the apartment. So that's, if you're gonna go that way where you're just going for it, full force...

• 1:05:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  If you're just being brazen in general, yeah.

• 1:05:33Derrick Levasseur?

  You're going for the door directly and you're not climbing up a wall.

• 1:05:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  So as McNee looked around the house, he noticed there were also no signs that the front door lock had been tampered with from the outside and no signs of forced entry through the French doors leading out to the terrace. Once inside Philomena's room, McNee agreed that the window had not been broken by a rock thrown from outside and that the break-in had been staged. So in this case, the person's going in, they are breaking the window from the inside and then I suppose going outside to get a rock and bring it in to look as if that rock was the way that the person broke into the window. Unless they came prepared with the rock, but it seemed to be a pretty big rock, so I don't know if that's the case.

• 1:06:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, I, I see what they're saying now though, because if someone had broken that window from the outside with the rock, and we were kinda going back and forth on this earlier, they would first have to open those shutter doors.

• 1:06:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  Open the shutters first, yeah.

• 1:06:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Right? And they'd have to open it and then throw the rock through the window.

• 1:06:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes.

• 1:06:32Derrick Levasseur?

  It would be very difficult to do that. You're gonna climb up there, open the shutters?

• 1:06:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  It would be difficult to climb up with the rock and then to balance yourself up there to be able to open the shutters and then throw the rock in, yeah.

• 1:06:42Derrick Levasseur?

  Couple that with the rock being on top of things that they believed were rummaged through after breaking into the apartment. That's why they're, that's why they're coming to this conclusion.

• 1:06:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  If you were gonna break the window, then you might have just brought like a hammer or something you could tuck into your belt loop and then climb and then pull the hammer out and break it. You wouldn't be grabbing a huge rock the size of someone's head, scaling the wall like Spider-Man with this rock in your hand.

• 1:07:05Derrick Levasseur?

  Regardless of what you believed, whether it was before we covered this case or even now, I think most people are gonna come to the conclusion that this rock thing, this, this, this robbery setup is more than likely something that was done after the fact.

• 1:07:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  So then McNee theorized that either Meredith or Amanda had actually let the attacker or attackers into the villa. When McNee went into Meredith's bedroom, he immediately zeroed in on the quilt covering her body. Once again, he thought the act of covering her body with a duvet suggested a mark of pity, and he now firmly believed that the killer was someone Meredith knew. McNee then went to the basement flat to look around. There were no signs of forced entry there either, but small traces of blood were found on a quilt, a bed, a pillowcase, a sofa, and on the floor. Now, at this time, the flat was empty because all four of the Italian guys who lived there were on vacation, hours away with their families. So that's their alibis. These four Italian guys, not in town at all.

• 1:08:03Derrick Levasseur?

  Not in town at all, so we can clear them off the list.

• 1:08:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  So no signs of forced entry there, so we're assuming the attacker or attackers did not enter through the basement flat, but at some point, they were down there, or Meredith was down there because there's traces of blood found on the quilt, the bed, the pillowcase, sofa, and on the floor. Next, McNee spoke with Philomena, and according to him, she told him that Amanda's account of events didn't make sense. Other detectives told McNee they felt the same way, and based on these concerns, McNee decided to speak directly with Amanda Knox. During their conversation, McNee paid close attention to her body language. He later said that at times Amanda pressed both hands to her temples and shook her head,

• 1:08:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  and he interpreted the gesture as if she were trying to empty her mind of something. McNee does this a lot, where he's like, you know, she did this, and she acted this way, and I think that this is what she was trying to do. I'm not, to me, that's just like, I'm overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed, you know, I'm putting my hands to my temples, and I'm like shaking my head, it's like I'm overwhelmed, I'm overstimulated, there's too much happening, I don't understand, I don't know what's going on, especially with the language barrier of Amanda not speaking Italian, and that being, obviously, McNee's native language. So it could have been frustration, overwhelmed, but he said it was her trying to empty her head of something.

• 1:09:29Derrick Levasseur?

  I'd love to see his education in body language, and we talked about it before, having a foundation on a person, what's normal for them, and so, without having that baseline, and this being one of his first interactions with her, I think it's a stretch to come to that conclusion.

• 1:09:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  For sure a stretch. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, we'll be right back.

• 1:09:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, so crime scene investigators were brought in. They began collecting evidence throughout the villa. Inside Meredith's bedroom, they collected blood samples from the wardrobe, wall, and desk. They paid particular attention to the bed, which no longer had sheets on it. A mattress cover remained, and it showed bloody knife-shaped outlines, suggesting the knife had been placed on the bed after the stabbing began. A long blond hair was also found on the mattress cover. And as we know, Meredith did not have blond hair. So beneath the bed, near the head of the bed and the nightstand, investigators found a significant blood spot. Meredith's nightstand lamp was located near there as well,

• 1:10:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  positioned in a way that suggested someone may have been using it to look underneath, like underneath the bed, I guess.

• 1:10:39Derrick Levasseur?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  Amanda's nightstand lamp, the only functioning light in Amanda's room, was also found inside Meredith's bedroom. It was partially under the bed, near the foot of the bed. The brown purse found on the mattress with a sock looped around its handles contained a long blond hair. Investigators determined that along with her keys and phones, Meredith's wallet had also been taken from her purse. The wallet and keys were never recovered. So investigators determined that the pillow from the bed had been removed and was found on the floor underneath Meredith's body. The pillow had bloody footprints and handprints. The missing bed sheet was never recovered. The fitted bed sheet, however, was found bundled on the floor, partially underneath Meredith's body.

• 1:11:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  It was stained with blood and contained several hairs: red chestnut hair, an animal hair, a long blond hair, and a very short black hair. So we got a lot going on. We got a lot going on in this crime scene. And when I look at Amanda Knox, I don't see her as a blonde. I see her as kind of having like light brown hair. But during the documentary on Netflix, everyone, including Amanda herself, describes herself as being a blonde. I don't know what you think about that. So I'm not sure if they're saying these blond hairs are like a true blonde, like coming from a very blonde person, or blonde as in what they've described Amanda Knox to be, which, once again, I don't know if...

• 1:12:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  I would look at Amanda and say she's, she was a blonde. I don't know. She seems to have like kind of light brown hair to me. What do you think?

• 1:12:13Derrick Levasseur?

  I mean, I'm actually looking at the video that we just looked at earlier where she's kissing her boyfriend and I wouldn't describe her as blonde. There might be some strands of blonde in there. This goes back to the, uh, the debate we had about my hair. It's like, oh, you're dirty blonde, right? And it's like, maybe in person it would look different. She could have some strands of blonde in there. There are points where the light is hitting her hair at certain angles and I can see a little bit of like blonde in there, but I wouldn't describe her as a blonde, no.

• 1:12:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  No. So in the small bathroom Meredith had shared with Amanda, investigators found multiple traces of blood. Blood was present on the basin, on the top above it, and on a container of cotton buds left on the basin. Additional blood was found on the blue bath mat, on the bidet, on the toilet lid, on the floor tiles near the toilet, on the light switch, and on the door frame. No blood traces were found in the larger bathroom used by Philomena and Laura. That's the bathroom where the feces had been discovered.

• 1:13:09Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep. That's across, that's across the hall.

• 1:13:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes. So in Amanda's room, blood was found on her pillow and on the wall behind the nightstand. So this is interesting. There's now blood in Amanda's room and a lamp from Amanda's room was found in Meredith's room. So when Amanda showered, and then I would, I would expect went into her bedroom to pack clothes, which she said that's what she was there for, did she not notice that her lamp, the only light source in her room, was missing?

• 1:13:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, it's, it's not good. It's not a good look initially, but it could also come back to whoever's responsible for this after the crime, staging the crime scene by going into the other rooms.

• 1:13:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  Going into Amanda's room, getting the lamp and leaving the blood.

• 1:13:55Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep. Moving things around to create red herrings, to have law enforcement in there confused, running through different scenarios, looking at people who may be innocent because of the evidence. How simple just to take her lamp, throw it in there. Now you have detectives looking at her. So it's pretty smart if it was intentional. Um, that's, that's looking at it through different lenses, but it could also be as simple as it sounds, which is that Amanda's somehow involved, maybe not directly, maybe indirectly, maybe through someone she knows, and she does have a connection to this case. But- I'm not ready to go there yet. I think it's just as possible that the person responsible goes into these multiple rooms and grabs things just to distract law enforcement.

• 1:14:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  But we have talked about that these rooms are very small. They're sparse. There's not a lot. Yeah, not a big place. Amanda goes into her room after showering because she's got to get new clothes. So we know she had to have gone into her room.

• 1:14:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Right.

• 1:14:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  You don't notice your lamp's missing.

• 1:14:55Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, there's a lot of things going unnoticed. I will give you that. At this point, you have a lot of things that maybe not one of those individual pieces of evidence might not stand out. You might miss a blood stain or something. But in totality, at some point, you would think you'd say, okay.

• 1:15:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  What the hell's going on here?

• 1:15:14Derrick Levasseur?

  Something's bad.

• 1:15:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Something, something doesn't feel right, even if it's just an instinctual thing like.

• 1:15:18Derrick Levasseur?

  And I point, into her defense, at one point she did, right? I mean, that's, that's what happened. She felt like something was off.

• 1:15:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm hmm. Yes, allegedly.

• 1:15:25Derrick Levasseur?

  Was it the lamp? Did she notify law enforcement of that? Did she say, hey, my lamp was missing?

• 1:15:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  She, she did not of her own free will come forward and say, I noticed my lamp was missing.

• 1:15:34Derrick Levasseur?

  I would love to know what her response was once she was informed about the lamp and what her excuse would be for the lamp being in there. Did she, did she just say, I have no clue, which could be the truth?

• 1:15:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  But how did you not, how did you notice it wasn't in your room? Or how did you not notice that it wasn't in your room when you went in there?

• 1:15:49Derrick Levasseur?

  So here's the one thing I'll say. It was during the day when she came back to the apartment. And so depending on her normal behavior, if that's not something she would engage with during the day, is it possible that she missed the fact that the lamp was missing because she wouldn't have used it? Now, if she had said, I went back there at 10 o'clock at night, went into my room, got dressed in my room and never realized the lamp was missing, the simple question would be, then how'd you change with no light? But because it was during the day, there is a little bit of an out there. If we're being, if we're trying to be respectful and reasonable to Amanda, that she may be telling the truth. And even though it's, it's hard to believe, she might have missed it.

• 1:16:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not necessarily concerned right now about being respectful and fair to Amanda because while yes, she could be a victim. There's also a lot here that we have to look at and the rooms are quite small. Even the, the windows aren't, you know, super big. There's not a lot of windows. Even if it's 11 a.m. like she said, you would still maybe flip a switch to turn the light on just automatically out of habit. Notice the light's not there. You come into your room. It's not a large room. You know what you have in there. There's no lamp there. That's not going to sort of raise any signs to you. I would notice if the lamp was missing in my room. That's all I'm saying.

• 1:17:09Derrick Levasseur?

  Fair. I'm not saying you're wrong, but not everyone is you. You know, everyone's different.

• 1:17:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes. Not everyone is me and I'm not really usually big on noticing things. But I feel like that if it's the only light source in my room, I feel like that I would notice. So all of this evidence, including the feces, was collected and then sent for testing. We're going to talk about those results in a future episode.

• 1:17:30Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, of course you're going to do that to me.

• 1:17:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  I know. Well, we have to organize it this way. So shortly after 3 p.m. everyone at the villa was asked to go to the police station for questioning. Meredith's English friends, the ones she had spent time with the evening before, they also arrived and they were interviewed. Police asked everyone similar questions about who Meredith knew in town, the men she dated, her social life in Peruja, et cetera, et cetera, the normal questions you would ask. Amanda was one of the first people questioned. In her book, she wrote that the interview lasted about six hours and that for the first hour she did not have an interpreter. And it was during this interview that Amanda learned for certain that Meredith was dead. Because remember, she had said earlier that she knew a dead body was found in Meredith's

• 1:18:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  room, but she was sort of trying to convince herself and tell herself out of shock like, well, maybe it's not Meredith, maybe it's someone else. There's still a chance it's not Meredith. So now in this interview, she gets the confirmation that is Meredith. Meredith is gone. Amanda said she covered her mouth with her hands and shook her head no, unable to believe what she was being told. Now, once again, as a side note, none of these interviews were recorded. And even with an interpreter coming in for Amanda during this interview. There's still going to be something less lost in translation. There's still going to be things that are not properly kind of transmitted between Amanda and the detectives interviewing her.

• 1:18:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  There's a language barrier and it's kind of up to the interpreter at that point, how well and how concisely they are interpreting these languages to each part of the conversation. So Amanda told police she'd gone to Raphael's apartment the night before, stayed there the entire night. She returned to the villa around 11 a.m. Detectives immediately noticed this differed from what she had told the first responding detective earlier that she had returned home around 10 a.m. Aside from that time discrepancy, the rest of her account did remain the same. And in his statement to police, Raphael confirmed everything Amanda said. This is when they're talking to the police for the first time. That's going to change. So when they were not being interviewed, everyone waited together in a common room at the station.

• 1:19:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  And several people later told author John Folian that they were unsettled by Amanda and Raphael's behavior during this time. Like the police said, they said the two continued kissing and touching each other. Some also said they laughed at times and that when Amanda spoke about what had happened, she seemed detached, describing events as if they were ordinary. Once again, I don't find this to be odd. I don't at all. You're laughing. This is somebody you've known, you know, a little bit over a month. Once again, not a lifetime friend. You're sad that they're dead, but you're also trying to just get through this trauma of being involved in something so unexpectedly. I don't find them to be kissing and touching and laughing and even seeming detached to be odd.

• 1:20:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  In fact, I think seeming detached makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of shock happening here.

• 1:20:30Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I agree with what you're saying there. What I do want to point out is that at this point in the story, and I know you've just kind of hinted that maybe this changes later, but with everything aligning and Raphael and Amanda being on the same page, if somehow Amanda's responsible for this, Raphael's involved as well. I don't know how, I don't know the specifics, but at least at this point, it would have been a collaborative effort.

• 1:20:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, there was an account I heard in the Netflix documentary where somebody was talking to Amanda during this time when everyone's waiting and she said, oh, I hope Meredith didn't suffer too much or something like that. And Amanda said, of course she fucking suffered. She was stabbed to death, you know, and then she kind of like was very harsh with that remark. I also don't find that to be

• 1:21:14Derrick Levasseur?

  No.

• 1:21:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  a weird thing to say, you know, like you're you're this kind of the person who someone dies and someone says, I'm sorry for your loss. And it's like, what a stupid thing to say at this time, like, you know, and what a stupid thing to say, I hope she didn't suffer. Of course she fucking suffered, you know?

• 1:21:28Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:21:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's traumatic. So I don't find that to be weird. Uh, some witnesses even said Amanda told people over the phone that she was the one who had found Meredith, which they said wasn't true, but I mean, it technically was true. She was the one who went to the villa and I not not found her body, but you know, found, I don't know. What do you think about that? She did. She did technically like come in and and would have been the first person in the villa after Meredith was attacked and died to sort of notice things were off and then, you know, have have Raphael call the police and say that they couldn't find Meredith and Amanda's calling people to see where Meredith is. So in a way, I don't find that to be a crazy exaggeration.

• 1:22:12Derrick Levasseur?

  No, no, I don't think so.

• 1:22:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Others said that Amanda and Raphael spoke as though more than one person must have been involved in the attack and Meredith's roommate Laura also told police she thought she saw a long vertical red scratch on the middle of Amanda's throat, something she had not noticed the day before. Laura threw Amanda right under the bus. She's like, I thought I saw a scratch. I don't know. I thought I did. Now, most people, including Amanda and Raphael, remained at the police station overnight. Then at around 6 a.m., Philamina and her boyfriend drove them back to Raphael's apartment. By that point, prosecutor Giuliano McNee firmly believed that someone close to Meredith had betrayed her, allowing an accomplice into the villa to kill her and then helped stage the fake burglary.

• 1:22:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  He told author John Folian that he was inclined to rule out Philamina, who said she'd been with her boyfriend that night, and Laura, who said she'd been away visiting family. That left Amanda and the four guys living in the basement flat. McNee instructed the homicide squad to install phone taps and keep them under close observation. Now, I said earlier, the guys were out of town with their family, but at this time, they weren't questioned because they were out of town. And after finding out about Meredith, they got on a train to come back. But at that point, the police wouldn't have known that they were uptown with their families because they hadn't come back yet. So that evening, Amanda called her mother to update her on what was happening. And in her book, Amanda wrote that she did not realize she was a suspect at that point

• 1:23:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  and believed that she was genuinely assisting in the investigation. Although I think I may have felt a little bit like I was a suspect if when I first told the police what happened outside the flat, they were like, your story doesn't make any sense. You know, I might have felt like maybe they don't believe everything I'm saying. But that same evening, Amanda and Raphael went to a local store for clothing. Amanda did not have access to any of her belongings, which were still inside the sealed villa, and she needed clean underwear. So obviously, they're going shopping for underwear. And to her surprise, this outing ended up drawing a lot of attention. The shop owner later contacted police and said Amanda had picked out a thong and a pullover and that she and Raphael approached the register.

• 1:24:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  And that when they did approach, he overheard Raphael saying to her in English, quote, "Later, you'll put them on at home and we'll have hot sex," end quote. So apparently, that sort of drew some attention because I guess these two young people who are dating should not be thinking about sex at this time. And Amanda later wrote in her book that the outing was completely innocent. She said Raphael hugged her and gave her a few kisses, but he didn't say anything about having sex. Amanda says she didn't even buy a thong. She bought cotton bikini briefs. Despite that, once the thong statement later reached the media, it spread quickly with reports claiming the couple had gone lingerie shopping. And that is exactly how it was sort of purported in the media, that Amanda and Raphael,

• 1:25:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  after they got released from the police station, immediately went lingerie shopping and they were talking about sex. And like, even, once again, even if they were, I don't, I don't think that it automatically makes them guilty, but.

• 1:25:18Derrick Levasseur?

  I could argue that it makes them less guilty.

• 1:25:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Derrick Levasseur?

  Like if you just killed someone and you're trying to cover it up, you're going to give every impression possible to anybody watching you that you are

• 1:25:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  Devastated.

• 1:25:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Filled with guilt and fear and concern that this person could come back. And you would not be out lingerie shopping, but

• 1:25:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  So you, well, I mean, if you did it, then you wouldn't be filled with concern and fear that this person might be coming back. So

• 1:25:43Derrick Levasseur?

  You would give the illusion that you were, right? Like if I had killed someone and I wanted law enforcement to believe it, I would do everything I could under the sun to make it appear that I was petrified, that I was next. I wouldn't be out lingerie shopping. But if you're seriously just that oblivious to the fact that you're being considered as a suspect, maybe you would go out lingerie shopping because you think it's preposterous to believe that someone could assume you did this.

• 1:26:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  Someone could think you did this. Yeah.

• 1:26:09Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. So, so that that's, it could, it could go both ways. It all depends on what you think. This is where confirmation bias comes in. You could read that or hear that and think, yep, she did it. Or if you're, if you believe she's innocent, you would say, no, absolutely. This proves she didn't.

• 1:26:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. I don't, I don't think that even if they were out getting lingerie, that it would be like, oh, they, they are so callous. It's like, once again, she did not know Meredith that long. She's been in this very intense relationship with this young Italian man for about a week. We can tell they've been having sex a lot. They're very attracted to each other. They can't keep their hands off each other. And some people do use sex as like a distraction coping mechanism. We've heard about parents of children who've been murdered, who go home and have sex and people are like, how could they? And it's like, well, you know, this is maybe how these people find comfort and

• 1:26:57Derrick Levasseur?

  That's how they cope.

• 1:26:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. It's, it's, it's a weird thing to kind of look at it.

• 1:27:01Derrick Levasseur?

  And if you're looking at it that way, just to go back to the underwear, she didn't even buy lingerie. They make it sound better by saying she went and bought lingerie. And she's like, dude, I went and bought cotton underwear. Like, come on.

• 1:27:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I mean, she didn't have access to her clothing and everyone needs underwear, you know, even if you re-wear the same clothes for a few days, you want clean underwear. So that makes complete sense that she would have to go and buy some.

• 1:27:24Derrick Levasseur?

  Exactly.

• 1:27:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  But let's take a quick break. We'll be right back and we're going to talk about what Meredith's autopsy showed.

• 1:27:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  As the investigation moved forward, a forensic pathologist conducted Meredith's autopsy. Multiple stab wounds were documented, though accounts do differ on the total number of stab wounds Meredith suffered. Some sources claim she was stabbed 47 times, others say 12 times, or as few as seven.

• 1:27:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  I would say that it probably was more than seven. Once again, a very, very bloody scene. And you could tell this was an overkill kind of thing, like this, you always say, you know, you could have, you could have killed this girl in, in a few stab wounds. Why, you didn't need to keep going, kind of thing. Like it's, it was, it was pretty bad. There's a lot of blood.

• 1:28:15Derrick Levasseur?

  Lot of passion behind it.

• 1:28:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm-hmm. But every source did agree that the largest wound was on the left side of Meredith's neck. It measured just over three inches long and up to 1.5 inches wide. And it was so deep that it exposed tissue and bone. That's, that, that's crazy to me. So there, there was also a second wound on the right side of her neck, though it wasn't as severe. The pathologist also found what he described as, quote, "lakes of blood," end quote, inside Meredith's lungs, indicating that she had inhaled a large amount of her own blood and that it had taken several minutes for her to die. Meredith also had cuts on her hands consistent with defensive wounds. She also had bruises across her body, including inside her vagina, though

• 1:29:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  the pathologist could not determine whether this indicated rape or consensual sex without lubrication. There was also bruising around her anus and some dilation, which the pathologist said could have been caused by constipation. This pathologist is very, uh, you know, kind of not really knowing what these things could mean and leaving a lot of things open for interpretation, which I, I do feel caused some more confusion with this case. Now, additional bruising was found on Meredith's nose, inside her nostrils, on her mouth, on and below her jaw, and on the tip insides of her tongue where bite marks were also present. This bruising was consistent with an attacker clamping a hand over her mouth and nose in an apparent attempt to suffocate her,

• 1:29:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  although it was unclear if this occurred before or after the stabbing started. I also wondered, could this be somebody clamping a hand over her mouth and nose to quiet her so that she wasn't screaming? You know, I know that normally you wouldn't. Put your hand over someone's nose in order to make them quiet and that would, I guess, suggest more of a suffocation. But if, you know, there's a lot of chaos happening, she's moving, she's trying to get away and you put your hand over her face to stop her from screaming, you're not really going to be like, oh, my hand's over her nose. I better move it down and just cover her mouth. You know, it might be that they were trying to keep her quiet.

• 1:30:21Derrick Levasseur?

  You know, I want to point something else out before I forget. When you started to describe this autopsy because it's significant. And even though it's a little ambiguous at certain points, which pathologists love to do, right? They love to give themselves outs. But regardless of which way you go, whether it's consensual, non-consensual, the overall crime itself and the violence of the crime and the fact that there appears to have been a violent occurrence here, an encounter between the two parties, or at least two parties. One, it doesn't sound like this would be a woman who would be the primary offender. But secondly, if it were Amanda Knox, based on just some of the things you've described so far, it seems like Meredith fought back. And yet it doesn't appear, at least so far in the story, that Amanda had any signs of injury, which you would expect to see from someone with this brutal of an attack. But yet we have nothing.

• 1:31:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  I guess outside of that, that like, I guess, scratch that

• 1:31:10Derrick Levasseur?

  The scratch on her neck to me.

• 1:31:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  Laura claimed to have maybe seen, yeah.

• 1:31:12Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I think there'd be more. I think there'd be more. But just based on what you're describing so far, this sounds like a sexual assault slash murder. It doesn't sound like someone who was attacked by another woman and maybe it was even an accident that just an argument that that got out of control. This sounds like this was a deliberate act. And it's kind of leaning in the direction so far of someone who wanted more and was told no. At least that's my opinion.

• 1:31:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  Do you think this was premeditated planned or like a kind of a crime of opportunity? It escalated and then the person got mad?

• 1:31:44Derrick Levasseur?

  Without knowing for sure, I would say that this escalated because it doesn't seem like the meetup was even planned. If Meredith was planning on meeting someone that night and had to get home for them, I would think she may have said something like, hey, so and so is coming over tonight. We're going to hang out. And then you could argue that it was premeditated by that other person who said, yeah, I'm going to come over. Let's hang out, but they had these other intentions. This seems more likely that this person came over. Maybe they thought it was going to lead somewhere that it didn't. And they didn't realize it till they were already in the room and they felt like they were disrespected by Meredith saying no. And that's when it escalated to this. At least now, just on the surface, but overall, and we're starting to wind down this episode.

• 1:32:26Derrick Levasseur?

  I think everything points to a familiarity and, and, and knowing Meredith before the crime occurred. And then when you take the actual autopsy into consideration as well, it does appear to be sexual in nature. So to me, that indicates a male individual and, and I'm asking myself, without getting too far ahead of the story, how much of, of Meredith's past did we look into? Previous partners, boyfriends, just maybe someone they met one night or another. These, this is the direction I'm going as far as the profile of this person, but maybe you're going to hit me with a curve ball. That's going to change, change my mind.

• 1:32:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  Maybe I am, but we will get there. But yes, we already heard that, that the police questioned Meredith's friends. And they asked about, you know, did she have boyfriends? Who did she date? Things like that. So they did sort of scratch the surface on that.

• 1:33:14Derrick Levasseur?

  But what was it? Just a situationship, someone that maybe nobody knew about. I don't know. There's so many, there's so many angles here.

• 1:33:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, maybe somebody she had met in a bar one night, mentioned where she lived and they'd been trying to get a hold of her, but you know, they would probably, police would probably check Meredith's cell phone records at that point. See if any calls had come in, things like that. So it doesn't appear that, that if somebody had met her previously and then wanted more from her, that they were making themselves known as far as her electronic records go.

• 1:33:42Derrick Levasseur?

  No, you know, one more angle I think about, and I hope you're not getting mad at me for going to all these possibilities. Cause I just, I could talk about this for hours, but.

• 1:33:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  So it's a crime scene full of stuff that's, that if you look at it and you're like, what is all this stuff here for? And why was there, you know, a lamp put down like somebody was trying to look under the bed? What were they looking for? There was receipts found on, on the duvet that we haven't even talked about yet. Right. There's a lot of stuff at this crime scene that. It does seem personal.

• 1:34:08Derrick Levasseur?

  It does. And, and I hope you're proud of me because I've refrained so much on talking this episode, even though I feel like I've talked the entire episode. So I apologize if that's the truth. But what's my favorite phrase, right? Two things can be true at the same time. And, you know, two things could be true here. We know that Amanda did reach out on the 31st about, you know, what, what was Meredith up to? And we know that Amanda was texted by her boss on 80, at 818, then on November 1st, saying, hey, you don't have to come in tonight. Is there any point where Amanda and Raphael, and maybe a friend of his, decide to go back to Amanda's house? Does something go down there where they know Meredith is home alone? So they all go over there and there's the four of them hanging out. And, you know, as couples do sometimes, you know, they separate, go their own ways,

• 1:34:52Derrick Levasseur?

  and something went down in that other room that Amanda and Raphael weren't aware of initially. Again, I'm just, it's total speculation at this point, but I'm just throwing out there that there is a world where Amanda knows more than she's saying, but still isn't the primary offender here. So I'm considering all options at this point. The only thing I've really ruled out is I don't believe someone threw a rock through the window and broke in that way. That's the only thing I'm pretty confident about.

• 1:35:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  So you don't believe somebody just followed Meredith home randomly, not knowing who she was, not knowing anything about where she lived or who she lived with, and then climbed up the house, broke into a window, found her bedroom, and killed her?

• 1:35:30Derrick Levasseur?

  Correct. I don't. And the main reason being there is clearly some level of familiarity with the house, as far as how to get around it and what to lock and what not to lock, and also a sense of security. And what I mean by that is they not only committed the crime, but they stayed behind after the fact to stage the scene by going in Amanda's room, by going in Filomena's room. And the only way you would feel

• 1:35:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  Even Laura's room, they went in and like rifled through some drawers.

• 1:35:52Derrick Levasseur?

  That's right. And the only way you would feel confident and safe enough to do that is if you knew nobody else was coming home that evening. So to me, that clearly indicates that this person had an understanding and a familiarity with that apartment.

• 1:36:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, but that person would have to know that Filomena was with her boyfriend, and Laura was out of town, and Amanda was with her boyfriend. And who would know all of that?

• 1:36:16Derrick Levasseur?

  It would be someone who was invited into the apartment and either Meredith disclosed that to them by saying, hey, come on over. My two roommates are out of town and my other roommates with her boyfriend for the night.

• 1:36:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  Or my other roommate's supposed to be working tonight.

• 1:36:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Right, exactly. So they're not expecting anyone to come home. So it could have been a brief interaction, but either way, I believe this person was invited into that house. Or they had the ability to go in on their own.

• 1:36:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  According to Meredith's digital records, she was not seeing anybody. In Perugia, there wasn't any texts or calls from anybody that would suggest she had a relationship of any kind. So.

• 1:36:50Derrick Levasseur?

  Which could give some credence to the idea that maybe Amanda brought someone over.

• 1:36:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:54Derrick Levasseur?

  Right?

• 1:36:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think that's why the Italian police thought that, yeah.

• 1:36:58Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, they did think that?

• 1:36:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, I think the Italian police thought that Amanda was somehow.

• 1:37:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Did you just slip?

• 1:37:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, because I said that earlier, that McNee said that he believed that Amanda or Meredith had let in their, the assailant, right? So if Amanda or Meredith let in the assailant and Meredith's dead and Amanda's alive, then that sort of goes without saying that McNee believes Amanda was sort of an accomplice to the person.

• 1:37:23Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, especially he's indicating that she believes she's not telling the truth.

• 1:37:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes.

• 1:37:26Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I think it's possible, for sure.

• 1:37:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  So in addition to all of those horrific injuries, Meredith's superior right thyroid artery had been completely severed and the hyoid bone was fractured. The pathologist said this fracture could have been caused either by an attempt to strangle Meredith or by a blow from the blade of a knife. The pathologist ultimately concluded that Meredith died from cardiorespiratory failure caused by asphyxiation from attempted strangulation or suffocation combined with hemorrhaging from the major neck wound, which he said was, quote, "caused by a pointed and cutting weapon," end quote. And her estimated time of death was determined to be between 10:00 PM and midnight, most likely around 11:00

• 1:38:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  PM. Now, keep in mind, if Amanda Knox had not been called off of work, her alibi would be completely locked up here.

• 1:38:15Derrick Levasseur?

  Yes.

• 1:38:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  She's at work.

• 1:38:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep.

• 1:38:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  Can't, can't be involved at all.

• 1:38:19Derrick Levasseur?

  Can't be her. Can't be two places at once.

• 1:38:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  So after the autopsy, Meredith's roommates were called back into the police station for further questioning. According to the detective interviewing Amanda, while she was being questioned, Rafael showed up insisting on being allowed to speak with Amanda. The detective found this unusual. Amanda and Rafael had known each other for only nine days. Still, she agreed to let her see him and she placed them together in an office that she had already bugged. Now they didn't end up seeing anything incriminating and Raphael eventually left. Laura and Philomena were then brought into the bugged room. Amanda told them she felt she was being treated like a criminal, saying police kept asking her the same questions over and over despite her giving the same answers. Afterward, the roommates were taken back to the villa and they were asked to go through the kitchen to see whether any knives were missing.

• 1:39:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  As the knives were shown to her, Amanda began to cry. Police later said this was the first time they had seen her cry. In her book, Amanda wrote that it was her first time back inside the house since Meredith was killed and the weight of what had happened finally hit her, which I find to be completely reasonable.

• 1:39:23Derrick Levasseur?

  I agree.

• 1:39:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  Police then interviewed the four men who lived in the basement flat. They were asked about people who had visited the flat prior to their trip. One of the men, Stefano, mentioned a recent visitor to the villa, a young man nicknamed The Baron. He described him as a fit, South African man who was attracted to Amanda. Stefano couldn't recall The Baron's real name, but remembered that the man had once come over to the flat, drank heavily, used the toilet, and didn't flush it. Of course, that piece of information stood out, so after Stefano's statement, the detectives attempted to figure out who The Baron was, but it would be weeks before they knew his name.

• 1:40:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Hmm.

• 1:40:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  So as the investigation continued, detectives also began reviewing phone records belonging to Meredith, Amanda, and Raphael. Meredith's phone records showed that on November 1st at 8:56 PM, she called home in England but did not reach anyone. And that sort of lines up with your timeline of her getting back to the flat around 9. Because if she's calling someone at home at 8:56, it's probably once she's gotten home after walking Sophie home. Then, at 9:58 PM, her phone dialed the number 901, which corresponded to an answering machine, but the call ended before the greeting finished. Two minutes later, a final call was placed to a number associated with a bank, but it failed because the international prefix had not been entered.

• 1:40:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  This is all very interesting. So phone records also show that Amanda and Raphael's phones went inactive within minutes of each other on the night of the murder. Amanda's phone was inactive from 8:35 PM until the following morning. The exact time wasn't listed. Raphael's phone was inactive from 8:42 PM until 6:02 AM. This stood out to detectives because records showed that both typically kept their phones on until late at night before turning them off. So this is also suspicious.

• 1:41:19Derrick Levasseur?

  So when you say inactive, you mean phones went off?

• 1:41:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  So, yes, they were turned off. And later Amanda would say that she had turned her phone off so early at, on this night because she didn't want her boss to change his mind about her coming into work. Because remember, she's supposed to be there at 10.

• 1:41:38Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  And he calls her at, what, like 8, 8, 18, was it?

• 1:41:41Derrick Levasseur?

  18.

• 1:41:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:42Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep.

• 1:41:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  So she's thinking, okay, he's calling me at 8:18 and saying I don't have to come in, but my shift doesn't technically start until 10. So there's still time where he could change his mind and call me back before 10 and be like, oh, actually, we got busier. You, we, we're gonna need you to come in. She didn't want to come in, so she shut her phone off so that her boss wouldn't be able to call her back and be like, hey, I changed my mind, come in. That was what Amanda said.

• 1:42:06Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm not gonna go too far down this path because I feel like it could be something, it could be nothing. Her, her explanation does make sense. I've definitely done that where I'm like, yeah, I don't want to get called back into the police station. I'm turning off my phone.

• 1:42:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  You wanted to get called back into work, you mean?

• 1:42:20Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, to the, to the police station. That's where I worked.

• 1:42:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh.

• 1:42:26Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I didn't want to get called back into the police station if something popped off. But, um, but no, it, it, it could be something, it could be nothing. To me, it's more interesting that their phones went off within minutes of each other. You're talking about a seven minute difference, 8:35, 8:42. That's, that's interesting to me. However, you just said a couple of minutes ago that at 9:58. She or allegedly someone from Meredith's phone used it to dial the number nine zero one for that answering machine. So that's, that's two hours after or an hour and a half after their phones would have went off. So that would mean that they knew something was going to happen or someone else was using Meredith's phone. Um, but, but I also don't think that

• 1:43:07Derrick Levasseur?

  if their phones went off at eight 35 and eight 42, the suspect or whoever was involved would be calling their Meredith's mother at eight 56.

• 1:43:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, I agree. That was Meredith.

• 1:43:21Derrick Levasseur?

  So the, so that to me was Meredith. So which would mean she was still alive at approximately nine PM. And from what we know, Meredith wasn't even home by eight 35, eight 42. So did they know that they were going to go over there and do this? I actually think if I had to choose, it's either nothing or it gives more credibility to the fact that they didn't have anything to do with her crime.

• 1:43:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  So I do find it suspicious that both of their phones were turned off.

• 1:43:44Derrick Levasseur?

  I agree. Yeah.

• 1:43:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  And then Raffais came back on at six oh two AM. Like if you're not getting up for anything, why are you getting up at six oh two? You know?

• 1:43:53Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. That's, that to me is that right there is a dangerous thing. Anyone getting up at six.

• 1:43:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. Why are you doing that? That's, that's absolutely, that's a sign of a psychopath. Yeah. Right there. Well, you get up at six oh two.

• 1:44:03Derrick Levasseur?

  And I know there's a lot of morning people. We're just joking. I'm just not a morning person.

• 1:44:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  I, yeah, I'm not, no, I'm not, I'm not. First of all, I'm not going to go to sleep with my phone off all night because that would make me very nervous. Like what if something happens? But I have kids, so that's a different thing.

• 1:44:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:44:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  But.

• 1:44:18Derrick Levasseur?

  Different times back then too. We weren't as attached to our phones as we are now.

• 1:44:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:22Derrick Levasseur?

  To be honest.

• 1:44:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  But did Amanda's boss have Raphael's phone number? So Amanda was like, Raphael, shut your phone off too. That way he can't call you.

• 1:44:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:44:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Knowing I'm with you, you know? So we'll both shut our phones off and we'll, we'll just say we went to sleep. That, that could be very possible. But the fact that your roommate was murdered and you guys shut your phones off, it doesn't, it doesn't look good. It doesn't look good. And we've got a lot of coincidences now, right? We got a lot of coincidences. Amanda going in to the flat and just not finding the blood.

• 1:44:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Right.

• 1:44:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  And that stuff to be alarming, not noticing the lamp in her room is missing. Finding the the poop in the toilet and then saying she flushed it, but she didn't flush it. All of this, why didn't you flush it? If I found it, I would have flushed it. All of these things are not super looking good for her. That's all.

• 1:45:09Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, but I don't I don't want to lose sight of the fact of what you mentioned as well about the Baron, because I don't know if the Baron is involved in this story. But to me, I still think the concept of a person like that holds a lot of weight. This this individual could be someone who knew of Meredith, but maybe knew someone else who lived at that apartment. Four women living there, they're living their best life. There are people coming and going all the time. It could be someone who was brought over there by Philomena or Amanda at one point and just saw Meredith and understood that nobody else was home but Meredith and came over there and said, hey, is Amanda around or is Philomena around? And Meredith says, no. And then it goes from there. There's there's there's

• 1:45:52Derrick Levasseur?

  so many options here when it comes to anybody who had been at that apartment before and may have an understanding not only of the layout, but how they live as far as locking their doors, etc. And may have even known that certain people wouldn't be home that night. So it doesn't have to be someone direct who was in contact with Meredith who she reached out to and said, hey, come on over. It could just be someone who stopped by the house because they had been there before.

• 1:46:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, and and we will, we will talk about the Baron more. So that is important. I mean, I think

• 1:46:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Not only the Baron, but other people like the Baron. I think that still applies.

• 1:46:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I think if the story of him going over and like using the bathroom and not flushing it is true.

• 1:46:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that right there is a crime. Lock him up.

• 1:46:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, shows once again, you're waking up at 6am, you're a psychopath. If you're going to somebody's apartment and using the bathroom and not flushing it.

• 1:46:38Derrick Levasseur?

  And just leaving calling cards.

• 1:46:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  Guilty as charged. Yeah, so if that that does show a pattern of behavior, though, maybe that's what he just did all the time, even in his own house.

• 1:46:47Derrick Levasseur?

  Creature of habit.

• 1:46:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  So that's, that's interesting. According to court records, Amanda's first call on November 2nd was placed to Meredith at 12:07 PM with no answer. Immediately afterward, she called Philomena. That was followed by another call to Meredith and then another call to Philomena. At 12:51 PM, Raphael called the police to report the break-in while Amanda spoke with her mother. Now, if you recall, part one, Amanda wrote in her book that she called her mom first, then Philomena, and that Philomena told her to call Meredith, at which point she said she called Meredith for the first time. So we do have a discrepancy here.

• 1:47:23Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, this could be just Amanda remembering things differently years later when she wrote the book, but you'd think you'd want to kind of get this timeline of the morning that your roommate was found murdered, a little bit more accurate and you kind of check your sources.

• 1:47:37Derrick Levasseur?

  Want to lock that in.

• 1:47:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, before you publish this book.

• 1:47:38Derrick Levasseur?

  Because it will be used against you, for sure.

• 1:47:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes. So at this point, police had not identified a suspect, a clear motive, or the murder weapon. Because Raphael and Amanda's accounts remained confusing, the detectives decided to question Raphael again on November 5th. They asked him to come alone. Yet, he and Amanda arrived at the police station together at around 10:30 PM, which the police found weird. Like, we told you to come alone, why is she here with you? You know, almost like she was trying to watch him. Like, don't say anything, I'm here. But he did, he did say something. So.

• 1:48:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh.

• 1:48:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. So by the morning, both would be arrested on suspicion of murder, but all of that's going to have to wait till part three.

• 1:48:18Derrick Levasseur?

  Wow.

• 1:48:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  And this is where things get really murky. And I cannot wait to hear your take on it because, yeah, I mean, this is where things get murky. I'm just going to give you a little spoiler, but Raphael, under intense scrutiny and intense questioning, he kind of confesses, or basically throws Amanda under the bus. He doesn't really confess. He throws Amanda under the bus. And then Amanda goes in, and then she throws her boss, Patrick, under the bus. And then Patrick gets arrested. So.

• 1:48:50Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay.

• 1:48:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  None of it really makes sense. And then later, both Amanda and Raphael are going to be like, we just didn't know what to say because we were questioned for so long and it wasn't letting up that we just sort of like told them what they wanted to hear, but. I don't know. It's concerning. So I can't wait to dive into that with you next week.

• 1:49:09Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm ready now. Just keep going. Yeah, I apologize. I was really talking a lot this episode because there's so much in my brain and I didn't want to forget it. The short version, you can't really rule out anything yet. I feel like whoever is responsible for this, and I've said it 17 times this episode, but I'll keep coming back to it. Familiarity. They've been at this apartment before. They knew the layout. They knew how they lived. This wasn't just some random stranger. It could have been someone who only knew them for a short period of time, but it is my belief that whoever this was had been at that apartment before. And more than likely, they were inside that apartment, at least for the initial period, because they were invited, because they were

• 1:49:50Derrick Levasseur?

  allowed to be there. I think the rock and the shutters and the clothes being thrown everywhere, I think it's a red herring. At least that's where I sit right now, subject to change. But based on what you're telling me, it's starting to go that direction.

• 1:50:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I mean, let's say it was the Baron, and we heard from Stefano that the Baron was interested in Amanda. So let's say the Baron shows up at the apartment looking for Amanda, and Meredith's like, Amanda's at work right now. And he's like, well, can I come in and wait for her?

• 1:50:19Derrick Levasseur?

  That's right.

• 1:50:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  And she could have been like, yeah, sure. I mean, I don't know why she would have done that, knowing that Amanda's dating Raphael, and they had this relationship for a week, but she, maybe he was insistent, maybe he said that he and Amanda were meeting up. He told her that Amanda planned for him to be there, and that she was gonna be coming along shortly. Can I just go inside and wait for her? And then it happens. Yes.

• 1:50:39Derrick Levasseur?

  How often are people coming and going from that residence? Is it a common thing that people are allowed to kind of hang out and chill until other people get home? I don't know. These are the things we have to talk about. But as far as Amanda's concerned, is there a possibility that she went back to the apartment that night with Raphael and maybe someone else? Yeah, I think it's still on the table. But based on the autopsy itself, it doesn't sound to me like the primary offender was a woman. I can't say with 100% certainty.

• 1:51:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  I agree with you, yes.

• 1:51:06Derrick Levasseur?

  To a certain degree, it sounds sexual in nature. And it seems like even though the pathologist couldn't nail it down, there was some form of sexual encounter that had taken place within a reasonable amount of time of her murder. Consensual or not consensual, something took place and clearly that wasn't Amanda.

• 1:51:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes.

• 1:51:22Derrick Levasseur?

  So that's where I'm at on this one. It's fascinating stuff. Can't wait for part three. This was a long one. Any final words from you?

• 1:51:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  Um, no, I am really looking forward to next week though, and I can't wait to hear what everybody thinks about what we've talked about today, specifically, um, the evidence, you know, the window, uh, how, how important do you guys think the window is? Are you in the camp who believes somebody could have entered through that window? Or it's a possible form of entry? Are you kind of with us and and the police where it's like, no, that was definitely staged, but why was it staged? Uh, maybe it wasn't staged by Amanda, maybe it was staged by somebody else, but it definitely was staged. And what would be the point in, in doing that and things like that? So I can't wait to hear what you guys think about the evidence we've covered today. And, uh, we'll, we'll keep it going next week, but this is a, it's a crazy case and

• 1:52:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  a really chaotic, uh, crime scene with a lot of items that are, we, we really should try to explain why they were there or why somebody would have put them there. And maybe we can go more in depth on that later on in the series.

• 1:52:24Derrick Levasseur?

  I, I, I love going over these cases that most people feel like they know. I, I didn't know it and you know, there were some people who are like, I don't know why you're covering this case. It's more obscure cases you can cover. This right here is the reason we're covering it, not only to build up the catalog. So we cover all cases that you're familiar with, but because I want to hear about it. I want to hear your perspective on it and it's our first time experiencing it. So for us, or at least for me, it's new and, and I'm, I'm really glad we're doing it. So that's going to do it for us, guys. We appreciate you being here. If you haven't already, because I don't mention it a lot, please like, comment, subscribe, whether you're listening on audio or you're watching on YouTube, we don't mention it a lot. Uh, we don't ask for a lot, but we would really appreciate it. It helps out the channel. It gets more exposure on the cases we're covering.

• 1:53:06Derrick Levasseur?

  So until next week, everyone stays safe out there. We'll see you soon.

• 1:53:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  Bye.