20
2007
English student Meredith Kercher, 22, was knifed to death Halloween night in Perugia.
The suspects: her American roommate Amanda "Foxy Knoxy" Knox and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, pub owner Patrick Lumumba and a semi-professional basketball player Rudy Hermann Guede arrested today in Germany.
Drugs and some kind of sex game gone wrong are the established scenario. But none of them are fessing up, versions of what happened and who was where, when have shifted so many times since Kercher was "found" by Knox in a bloody pool under her bed the following morning that predicting where the truth lies has become nearly impossible.
As is often the case, the real-life CSI crew has not come up trumps but the telegenic faces of the protagonists are keeping the Italian public mesmerized.
Like a lot of journalists, my news diet is a fairly restricted one, most times leaving aside with nary a nibble stuff that I'm unlikely to cover. If you're obliged to gorge on so many outlets every day, you tend not to bloat yourself with those men-biting-dog stories that fall out of scope.
In the interest of preserving sanity, random deaths, murders, kidnappings are off my news menu.
But like everyone else here, I haven't missed a single tawdry detail of the Perugia murder story, eating it up with obsessive zapping on seven major networks every night.
The dramatis personae is a catalog of the kinds of foreigners Italians find fascinating: young, pretty, footloose English-speaking women on a year abroad, the older, integrated Congolese musician who runs a business and the handsome black baller.
Mixed up in this somehow is the "figlio di papà" (daddy's boy) the quiet, bespectacled son of a prominent Southern doctor with almost feminine good looks and the strange habit of always wearing a pocketknife coordinated with his outfits.
Italian media calls unsolved crime cases "gialli" (lit. "yellows") (publisher Mondadori sells mystery paperbacks in screaming yellow) and there's nearly enough material -- thanks to youtube and facebook -- to shoot a movie from it.
The site entries have long been removed, but not before the media put together an ample package of images, considering none of the protagonists are public figures -- Kercher in her vampire costume, Sollecito wielding a cleaver, Knox striking a pose, Lumumba playing at the club, and even Guede, on the lam until today, turned up in a shot embraced by fashion designer Giorgio Armani.
Identifying with the victim is another reason why I can't keep myself away from the story. Kercher, by all accounts, was not nearly as stupid as I was at that age or any of the students I saw through a year abroad in Florence when I later worked for another school.
It's not just me, either. There are over 3,000 people signed up on a facebook group called "Nobody should die in his/her Erasmus (Meredith Kercher RIP)" attest to the wrongness of her death.
Thousands of foreigners come to Italy for that edifying year abroad expecting a few adventures, an overdose of museums, a little romance and ample amounts of wine tasting.
Most times we taught them to avoid pickpockets, hoped they wouldn't have to learn the meaning of "frottage" and bailed them out after they'd stolen an ancient knick-knack on a dare. Everyone made it home safely, in some cases none the wiser.
The new suspect and ongoing silence are likely to draw the Perugia murder mystery out, as will an apparent copycat murder in Paris.
Stay tuned.