Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
Simulist wrote:People do all kinds of crazy things when they're terrified, don't they? I've even heard that drowning people will sometimes try to climb on top of a rescuer during the course of their frenzy of fear.
Few people think they'd the so crazy though. But they might be.
And most onlookers will simply point, and shake their heads. "Just look at that drowning idiot," they might say. "Not a nice person, at all."
Searcher08 wrote:When many humans drown, their movements are often small and do little to attract attention, which is why both children and adults can drown in a public pool full of people (I was pulled from the bottom of a public pool at age four... and didn't learn to swim till I was err.. over 25.
I have great respect for lifeguards as a profession )
82_28 wrote:I've spent the time reading that (great site btw, searcher) true justice site and a bunch of other stuff around the webs. I still just don't feel it in my gut that Knox had anything to do with anything other than being tied up by a bunch of circumstances.
Not that it means anything, but I live and work around the UW, filled with a bunch of men and women who can admittedly go crazy when their amateur asses get drunk and stuff, yet the profile of a female UW student studying abroad and weeks after arrival even having a hand in a brutal murder begs disbelief.
She comes from a supportive family.
She's female.
She is young.
She attended a very selective school.
She doesn't give off a whiff of anything other than being a normal person living under such circumstances. I don't care which way you cut it, it would be a rarity in the extreme if Knox had a thing to do with this. And unlike one of the posts on the true justice site which said basically that the evidence or something would have had her and Solicito convicted in the US or UK, I say, I don't think so at all. In the US, I feel, it would have been, taking into account the "botched" forensic investigation, thrown out on motions. I also think the language barrier and cultural norms for the roles of women and men in the two countries had a lot to play in this as well.
Not because I am an American, but coming from an American who lives in the same city as Knox, I simply do not believe she did shit that night other than get high, get fucked and get the fuck scared out of her in accusatory Italian.
Of course the Knox's are going to hire a PR firm. What family in support of their kid half way 'round the world wouldn't seek help, even from the likes of Donald Trump? This shit must have cost a fortune and a half for them. The family was clearly desperate.
So, to sum up -- I respectfully disagree with my friends here who do think she had something do with any of it. Hell, I thought my apartment manager murdered his girlfriend a few months ago and was proven wrong. I thought a downstairs neighbor killed herself like six months ago because her stereo was blaring for like 12 hours and weeks before that we had to help her while she was manically depressed and semi-suicidal and totally drunk of course too. I called 911 on that one and embarrassingly the FD broke down her door only to find that she wasn't there. So, I could be wrong and I could be right. I just don't think Knox played any part in any of it.
October 10. A few thoughts on the Amanda Knox spectacle. The other day there was a great piece in the Guardian, Amanda Knox: What's in a face? Basically we're really bad at reading people's states of mind from their expressions and behavior, but we think we're really good. Knox got in trouble because she was too real. If she had put on a mask of how she was supposed to behave, everyone would have believed her. But when she showed her full complexity, everyone thought she was acting weird. I can relate to this.
Also, someone has to say it: If Amanda Knox were guilty, she would be even hotter. Has there ever, in the history of the world, been a woman so young and pretty who was also a sex killer? I doubt it. But it happens all the time in fiction. This should have been our first clue that the prosecution's case was fiction.
They wanted to believe it so badly that they tortured a confession. This article, False confessions: Silence is golden, shows how easy it is to make people admit to things they didn't do. We think the longer a police interrogation goes on, the closer it gets to the truth, when really it gets closer to what the police want to hear. More generally, we greatly overestimate our ability to stand up to psychological pressure. That's why Amanda Knox thought she had nothing to lose by talking to the police without a lawyer, and it's why you should never go to a timeshare presentation.
82_28 wrote:Stephen, what are you talking about?
The family is not rich. I've seen rich in this area. First, the family lives in West Seattle. West Seattle = Not rich.
The fact that the victim was also female is classic tu quoque. It's simple. The psychological profile of a young woman from a supportive (and not wealthy) family studying abroad does not lend itself to brutal or even (Jesus) "satanic" murderer. I'd think you'd be the one applying Occam here.
I just read this last night from Ran Prieur:October 10. A few thoughts on the Amanda Knox spectacle. The other day there was a great piece in the Guardian, Amanda Knox: What's in a face? Basically we're really bad at reading people's states of mind from their expressions and behavior, but we think we're really good. Knox got in trouble because she was too real. If she had put on a mask of how she was supposed to behave, everyone would have believed her. But when she showed her full complexity, everyone thought she was acting weird. I can relate to this.
Also, someone has to say it: If Amanda Knox were guilty, she would be even hotter. Has there ever, in the history of the world, been a woman so young and pretty who was also a sex killer? I doubt it. But it happens all the time in fiction. This should have been our first clue that the prosecution's case was fiction.
They wanted to believe it so badly that they tortured a confession. This article, False confessions: Silence is golden, shows how easy it is to make people admit to things they didn't do. We think the longer a police interrogation goes on, the closer it gets to the truth, when really it gets closer to what the police want to hear. More generally, we greatly overestimate our ability to stand up to psychological pressure. That's why Amanda Knox thought she had nothing to lose by talking to the police without a lawyer, and it's why you should never go to a timeshare presentation.
Hang it up. She didn't do it. Nor did she have any role in it other than the circumstances that tied her to Meredith. As I said upthread, I know people who know the family and the notion that she had any kind of affiliation with satanism is utterly ludicrous. Utterly. . .
This right here is a killer who's making the news rounds around here right now:
http://www.komonews.com/news/local/131573853.html
In short, she gives, as I have said, not a whiff of psychotic tendencies. Other people sometimes do.
Stephen Morgan wrote:She'd managed to find a house, job and boyfriend, I don't see why she couldn't have also joined a satanic murder ring.
I got 23 fan letters from guys today: Foxy Knoxy's disturbing diary
By David Jones Last updated at 1:36 AM on 28th June 2008
The handwriting is meticulously neat, though it seems to belong to a conscientious first-form pupil rather than an expensively educated university undergraduate.
The tone veers wildly from page to page.
At times, it is vulgar and vain to the point of narcissism; at others, it is pathetically self-pitying, as though the author regards herself as a cruelly wronged Shakespearean heroine.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic ... diary.html
'I'm writing this because I want to remember. I want to remember because this is an experience not many people will ever have. I am not saying I am glad everything that has happened has happened.
'If it were up to me, my friend would never have been killed.'
So begins what must surely rank as one of most extraordinary and revealing documents ever to have been penned behind prison bars - the 80-page personal diary kept by Amanda 'Foxy' Knox.
In the memoir, the young woman accused of murdering British exchange student Meredith Kercher claims that one of her jailers has developed a sexual fascination for her. 'Once again he is hitting on me,' she complains.
Suspect: Foxy Knoxy at a Halloween party
By the same token, she clearly revels in her new image, boasting of the many admiring letters she has received at the Italian jail.
Bizarrely, she also lists all her lovers and attempts to assess whether each could have infected her with HIV.
The privileged 20-year-old daughter of a Seattle department store executive, Knox is alleged to have been one of three people who killed fellow exchange student Meredith in November last year, the day after Halloween.
The popular, pretty 21-year-old from Coulsdon, Surrey, was found naked from the waist down, with her throat slashed three times, in the house she shared with Knox, and others, in the historic university city of Perugia.
Police believe Meredith was throttled and knifed to death after she refused to act out a perverted sex game with Knox, her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 24, and their drug-dealer friend from the Ivory Coast, Rudy Guede, 20.
Furthermore, a senior prosecution source tells me they are now convinced it was Foxy Knoxy who inflicted the fatal wound.
Like the other suspects - all of whom offer widely different versions of what happened on that bitterly cold late autumn evening - she vehemently protests her innocence, but has been languishing in custody since her arrest, five days after the murder.
For Knox, this means a shared cell in Capanne, the modern prison on the outskirts of Perugia, where her only visitors are from the Roman Catholic Church and Red Cross, and her parents, Curt Knox and Edda Millas, who have been taking turns to fly from Seattle to stay near her.
Victim: Meredith Kercher was found dead naked from the waist down, with her throat slashed three times
Last Tuesday morning, Mr Knox greeted his daughter with his customary hug, and a pair of fashionable, light pyjamas to keep her cool on stifling summer nights.
He also brings CDs, books and her favourite mozzarella cheese.
Until recently, Knox's hour-long, twice-weekly visits from her parents were routinely bugged by the police - a legitimate tactic in Italian murder investigations - stifling the conversation.
Perhaps that is one reason why Knox felt the need to pour out her innermost thoughts and feelings in her diary, which I have read in its entirety this week.
I was also given exclusive access to a previously unseen, four-page e-mail which Knox circulated to her closest relatives and friends on November 4, less than 24 hours before she was arrested on suspicion of murdering Meredith.
Written with the expressed aim of explaining her movements before and after Meredith died, but at times astonishingly insensitive, it is, in its way, just as revealing as the diary.
David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, is an expert on serial killers and has analysed the prison diaries of Fred West and Dennis Nilsen, among others.
He examined Knox's writing for the Daily Mail, and believes these documents give an extraordinary insight into the girl's mind and, significantly, 'clearly show that she has got something to hide'.
Studying the 80, A4-sized pages Knox wrote before her diary was seized by prison officials and handed to the police, Knox clearly sees herself as a martyr, Prof Wilson adds.
In a breathtaking departure from reality, she also appears to regard the entire episode as some drama that has made her university gap-year abroad more eventful than anyone else's.
The diary contains frequent references to her appearance, and she constantly complains that stodgy prison food has caused her to gain weight (it soared to 10st when she was first remanded in custody but she has since shed 15lb).
She also seems to relish being the centre of attention from lusting male admirers.
'Apparently someone out there saw me on TV and thought I was "hot" so they set up a website where people comment on how pretty I am,' she writes.
'Weird. Flattered but that really isn't important right now.'
Detectives believe Amanda helped subject Meredith to a terrifying ordeal
A few days later she returns to this theme: 'I received 23 fan letters today - that makes the count up to 35 letters. [They] are all from guys ranging from 20-35 on average, although I did receive a letter from a guy in his 50s.
'All of them reassure me that they believe me - the majority comment on how beautiful I am. I've received blatant love letters, a marriage proposal and others wanting to get to know "the girl with the angel face".
'Included in one was an article cut from a newspaper that talked about this new "Amanda" fad, about the letters I'm getting, as well as the websites that have popped up where people post comments like "she's hot" or "I'd do her".'
'If I were ugly, would they be writing me wishing me encouragement? I don't think so. Jeez, I'm not even that good looking. People are acting like I'm the prettiest thing since Helen of Troy.'
Perhaps intending to tease Raffaele Sollecito, who is said to have ditched her while in prison, she says all this sexual attention 'makes me think of DJ'.
This is a reference to the American boyfriend she left behind when she travelled to Italy, and whom she now claims to love the most.
Was it also with Sollecito in mind, one wonders, - [does one?] - that she chronicled in such detail the cloying attentions of a senior prison official?
'The guy is getting kind of weird. He says he looks at me like a daughter but whenever I'm with him I always feel like he's looking for something - and he seems very interested in my sex life.
'1) He winks at me when I receive "fan letters" from male inmates who have seen me on TV. 2) He tells me not to cry because it makes me ugly. 3) He's commenting on my figure quite a bit and blatantly gives me a stare up and down when he sees me. 4) He asks me if I dream about sex. 5) He wants to know if I'm good at sex. 6) When I told him I thought it strange that he was interested in my sexuality (I was being polite, what I meant was RUDE) he acted like it was no big deal and it was my fault for not drawing the line.'
sollecito
Amanda being consoled by her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito after Meredith's death
There is more of this. Much more. It only stops several days later, when the prison doctor informs her, incorrectly, she later concludes, that blood tests have revealed her to be HIV positive.
'I don't want to die, I want to get married and have children. I want to create something good. I want my life. Why why why?' she protests.
Knox then lists the seven men she has had sex with - 'in Italy', she writes first, but crosses out the word 'Italy' and writes 'in general' - concluding that she could theoretically have been infected by three of them.
From a Jesuit college-educated girl this is excruciating stuff, and hardly supports claims that her image as a vamp is the stuff of media invention.
But what do we learn of the night Meredith was murdered? Precious little is the answer, despite her claim to have recovered her drug-addled memory in a blinding flash following the visit of an inspirational Roman Catholic nun.
(This nun, she decides, must have 'come to her' for some deep purpose like Mother Mary in the Beatles song Let It Be, which she now sings continually, to the annoyance of fellow inmates).
All she 'remembers' is that she and Sollecito left her house at 5pm, some four hours before Meredith arrived home from a friend's. At his flat she says, they used his computer to find songs to play on her guitar, read Harry Potter in German, watched the film Amelie, and shared a fish supper before smoking marijuana and having sex.
They fell asleep, and by the time they awoke next morning Meredith had been murdered.
'It's that simple,' she says, pronouncing her innocence for the umpteenth time.
Perhaps so, though in her rambling e-mail to family and friends, sent at 3.24am on November 4, when she had no idea she was about to become a suspect, her recollections are strangely more detailed.
One might imagine she was crafting the opening chapter to a macabre thriller, with herself in the central role, naturally, rather than describing the tragic events surrounding the murder of her friend.
'The last time I saw Meredith, English, beautiful, funny, was when I came home after spending the night at a friend's house,' she begins.
'It was the day after Halloween, Thursday. I got home and she was still asleep, but after I had taken a shower and was fumbling around the kitchen she emerged from her room with the blood of her costume (vampire) dripping down her chin.'
In a story which the prosecution claim is riddled with holes, she goes on to explain how her suspicions were aroused the following day when she returned home after, she claims, spending the night with Sollecito to find Meredith's room locked, the toilet unflushed, and specks of blood in the bathroom.
She adds that she thought, at first, that the blood might have been Meredith's because she was having 'menstrual issues'.
But when banging on her door failed to arouse her, she called the police in a panic.
As Meredith's friends and family grieved, and the murder investigation swirled around her, Knox remained as self-absorbed as ever. That much is clear from her e-mail. She moans about suffering from a stomach ache after eating vending machine food while waiting all night to be interviewed by police.
And she complains at the injustice of having to pay rent for the following month, even though she won't be able to return to the house because it's been sealed off as a crime scene.
'It kind of sucks,' she remarks, as Meredith lay on a mortuary slab.
The sheer enormity of what has happened - and the grief of Meredith's parents who have lost a treasured daughter - doesn't seem to have occurred to her. The picture that Knox inadvertently paints of herself is one of a narcissistic young woman with a remarkably callous disregard for what has happened to Meredith.
But unattractive as that portrait is, it does not mean she's guilty of murder.
Indeed, she may well turn out to be innocent, as she insists. Nonetheless, Professor Wilson believes the diary and e-mail offer the first real insight into the mind of this enigmatic young woman.
The Italian prosecutors agree, and intend to use the documents as vital planks of evidence.
What struck Professor Wilson first was how little space she devotes to Meredith with just a few cursory lines describing her as a good friend who 'protected me when she knew I was in an uncomfortable situation'.
He says: 'There's no insight or empathy or understanding for how her family must feel. Meredith emerges in the diary as the reason why Knox is in this predicament.'
Nor is there any sign in the diary that she really does want 'to remember'.
Instead, it amounts to a long, self-absorbed open letter, possibly written in the hope that Sollecito (who refuses to substantiate her alibi: that she spent the night of the murder with him at his flat) might somehow read it and take pity on her.
'I think the key thing the diary demonstrates is that Knox and her boyfriend were embroiled in a classic folie-a-deux (madness shared by two people),' Professor Wilson says.
amanda
Disturbing: Amanda's diary contained little trace of remorse at Meredith's death
'Amanda Knox seems to want this arrangement to continue, and can't understand why he has brought it to an end by failing to stand by her.'
The documents emerged this week, just as the case enters a critical phase. For a few days ago, chief prosecutor Guiliano Mignini formally closed his investigation and submitted his 10,469 page dossier to defence lawyers. They now have until mid-July to make their final submissions.
Then, after the Italian judicial summer recess, a judge will examine the facts and decide whether to commit any (or all) of the trio for trial, or dismiss the case and release them.
In Perugia this week, a prosecution source assured me he was 'extremely confident' that sufficient evidence has been amassed. It includes a knife, found at Sollecito's house and 'compatible' with Meredith's neck wounds.
Traces of her DNA were allegedly found on the blade, with Knox's on the handle.
Then there is the prosecution's belated 'star witness' - an Albanian farm-worker who has just come forward to recall (somewhat hazily, it must be said) how he was confronted by the knife-wielding Knox and her boyfriend on the road, as he drove past the house on the night of the murder.
Armed with this testimony, plus that of 50 other witnesses, tell-tale footprints and phone records, Sr Mignini insists he has more than enough to keep Knox and her alleged cohorts in prison for 20 years, at minimum.
In court, he may spice up his case ( ) by suggesting that they were acting out some perverted, drug-fuelled ritual or fantasy, perhaps linked to Halloween, or even involving Knox's obsession with Harry Potter (whom she believes Sollecito strongly resembles).
Having remained resolutely silent for months as their daughter's reputation has been dragged through the gutter by way of leaked smears and racy accounts of her sexual adventures - [ like this one?] - however, Knox's family have now decided to fight fire with fire.
They have augmented their team of forensic experts and lawyers with a veteran Seattle-based PR, David Marriott, who is seeking to persuade us that the young woman said to have bought thongs for 'wild sex' with her boyfriend as the murder hunt got under way is really a sweet, unwordly tomboy who prefers camping and hiking to drug-charged bedroom romps.
So which one is the genuine Amanda Knox, and can she be telling the truth when she claims to have had nothing to do with Meredith's murder? Her diary and e-mail certainly show that Foxy Knoxy is guilty of crass insensitivity that belies her good breeding and Jesuit school education.
Whether she is guilty of something more sinister is a matter the Italian courts must determine.
82_28 wrote:She comes from a supportive family. She's female. She is young. She attended a very selective school. She doesn't give off a whiff of anything other than being a normal person living under such circumstances.
I got 23 fan letters from guys today: Foxy Knoxy's disturbing diary
By David Jones Last updated at 1:36 AM on 28th June 2008
The handwriting is meticulously neat, though it seems to belong to a conscientious first-form pupil rather than an expensively educated university undergraduate.
The tone veers wildly from page to page.
At times, it is vulgar and vain to the point of narcissism; at others, it is pathetically self-pitying, as though the author regards herself as a cruelly wronged Shakespearean heroine.
The privileged 20-year-old daughter of a Seattle department store executive
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 17 guests