IN NOVEMBER 2007, a British college student named Meredith Kercher was stabbed to death at her rented flat in Perugia, Italy.
You probably don’t remember this, or if you do, you’re not sure why. The murder of Kercher was a particular sort of tragedy: senseless and terrible, but also terribly ordinary, the kind of story that makes headlines for its shock value but then fades from view for its lack of mystery. The killer, a man named Rudy Guede, had an extensive criminal record. His bloody fingerprints at the scene left little question as to whodunit.
Except: By the time those prints were identified, the truth had taken a back seat to a more sensational narrative, one invented and vigorously promoted by the Italian police.
In their telling, it was Kercher’s roommate, an American exchange student named Amanda Knox, who had killed the young woman during some sort of satanic sex game gone awry. Knox and her boyfriend, Raffaelle Sollecito, were tried separately from Guede, convicted of murder, and spent four years in prison before being released on appeal in 2011.
And that story you probably do remember.
“What happened to my roommate was a horrible thing that happens to women all over the globe. She was at home, she was going to bed, and somebody came into our home and raped and murdered her,” Knox says. “But that story was completely lost.”
Knox is nearly a decade removed now from the days when her face was front-page tabloid fodder. Today, she’s the creator of a new podcast miniseries called that explores the ethics and history of true crime;
