Ride the Lightning

MURDER MOST WIRED: SEX AND DEATH IN ITALY

February 7, 2008

Hello from sunny L.A. and the ABA Midyear meeting, a long and bumpy plane ride from Virginia. I detest planes (gravity is one of the few scientific concepts that I understand) but I do enjoy having the time to simply sit and read. I finally caught up with a lurid story from the December 3, 2007 edition of Newsweek. Yup, I’m that far behind.

Here are the case facts in brief: On November 2, 2007, an elderly housewife in Perugia, Italy found two cell phones in the grass near her home. Knowing that cell phones are used by terrorists to trigger bombs, she called the police.

Phone records led the police to a cottage where they found the body of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, a British student. Her throat had apparently been slit during a bout of what was termed “extreme sex.” The phones continued to give the police their leads and allowed them to use Skype to find the location of a key suspect, an American student from Seattle, Washington named Amanda Knox, who referred to herself on Facebook as "Foxy Knoxy." Her 23-year-old Italian boyfriend, Raffacle Sollecito is also a suspect, along with Rudy Hermann Guede. Electronic evidence continued to mount up, in the form of creepy YouTube videos, Facebook entries, Net postings about a desire for “extreme sex,” and a search on Sollecito’s computer, after the murder, for the terms “bleach” and “blood.”

The suspects, who are in custody, all proclaim their innocence, but this “murder most wired” may well be solved by CSI style computer forensics. The British tabloids are having a field day with this story. You gotta know the movie script is being written – right here in L.A.

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