The trial of Amanda Knox had everything you might hope for in a tabloid story.
A beautiful young American. A brutal murder in a picturesque Italian town. Tales of sex games and occult rituals.
In and out of court for eight years, the murder case sparked heated discussions about race, sexuality, anti-Americanism, the Italian legal system and trial by media.
At the core of the matter, though, lay a bungled investigation and an overeager prosecution — and some uncomfortable truths about how modern societies judge young women.
With Knox's re-conviction on a charge of slander earlier this week — 17 years after the 2007 murder that kicked off the long-running legal saga — her story is back in the headlines.
Here's what we know about that fateful night in Italy, how police came to suspect Knox, and why the tabloid courtroom drama that followed still has the power to transfix audiences today.
A gruesome discovery
Knox's legal problems began — unbeknown to her — in Italy on the night of November 1, 2007, at an apartment in the medieval walled city of Perugia, a popular destination for overseas students.
Knox, a 20-year-old from Seattle living in Perugia to study Italian, shared the ground-floor, terraced apartment with British politics student Meredith Kercher, 21, and two young Italian law students, who were out of town that night.
She also spent the night elsewhere — at the home of her Italian boyfriend, 23-year-old Raffaele Sollecito.
When she returned to her apartment at 9am the next day, she found Kercher's bedroom door locked, and, after taking a shower, noticed drops of blood in the bathroom sink.
Assuming Kercher was asleep, and assuming the blood was menstrual blood that had not yet been cleaned up, she initially failed to raise the alarm.
It was only after Kercher failed to answer her phone that Knox became concerned, and went to get Sollecito.
Noticing signs of a break-in, they called one of her other roommates and — shortly after midday — eventually the police, who were initially hesitant to break down the door to Kercher's bedroom.
A friend of one of the legal students decided to kick the door down regardless, and Kercher's body was discovered lying on the floor inside at about 1:15pm.
Her throat was slit, and she had been stabbed 47 times.
54 hours of questioning
The delay between Knox's return home and her call to the police, combined with what investigators viewed as her indifferent, unusual manner after the body was discovered, meant she became a suspect almost immediately.
Police began to question her about the crime scene — which they believed had been staged to look like a burglary — and her whereabouts the night before.
They also noted that Knox and Sollecito, who had been dating for just a week, had kissed outside the apartment while investigators looked over the crime scene.
Over the four-day period that followed, they interviewed Knox for a total of 54 hours — without a lawyer, who they told her would make things worse for her, and without a competent translator.
Being questioned in a language she was still learning, and after investigators applied what a court later described as "great psychological pressure", Knox early one morning fabricated a story that she had in fact been at the apartment when the murder took place — and had heard Kercher be stabbed to death by Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked.
She later retracted the statement, saying she had only written it after she had spent hours of interrogation maintaining her original story, without police believing her.
To make matters worse, Sollecito, under similarly intense questioning, stopped telling investigators Knox had been at his apartment the entire night of the murder, instead telling them he could not remember if she had been there earlier in the evening.
Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba were arrested on November 6. Lumumba spent two weeks in custody before being released after customers at his bar proved he had been serving drinks that night.
Knox and Sollecito were charged with murder.
A mystery acquaintance
Another man, an Ivoirian acquaintance of Kercher's named Rudy Guede, was arrested in Germany several weeks after the murder after his fingerprints, DNA and a host of other forensic evidence pointing to him were found at the crime scene.
He maintained his innocence, telling investigators he had been in the flat with Kercher on a date that night when he emerged from the bathroom to see an unknown man standing over her bloodied body with a knife.
Guede said the man looked at him and said out loud to someone else: "Trovato negro, trovato colpevole. Andiamo," — which roughly translates to "We've got a black man, [so] we've got a culprit. Let's go." The man then left the scene, Guede said, causing him to also flee in panic.
Despite being recorded on Skype telling a friend Knox had nothing to do with the murder, Guede later told police he saw her silhouette pass by the window before he left.
Unlike Knox and Sollecito, Guede, who was known to police as a burglar and small-time drug dealer, opted for a quick trial, an option available under Italian law that speeds up the judicial process by waiving a number of a defendant's legal rights in exchange for a reduction in sentence if found guilty.
Unable to explain how his bloody handprint came to be on a pillow found underneath Kercher's body, Guede was convicted of murder and sexual assault and sentenced to 30 years in prison, later reduced to 16.
But despite a preponderance of DNA evidence linking Guede to the scene, and barely any pointing to Knox or Sollecito, prosecutors weren't satisfied with a single conviction.
They had substituted Guede in for Lumumba in their initial theories, and were alleging that the three had carried out the killing together in a sex game gone wrong.
'Foxy Knoxy' and trial by media
In the lead-up to the trial, a trove of information about the case had already been provided to journalists, including crime scene photos, a diary Knox kept while in prison, and details of several one-night stands she had had before meeting Sollecito.
A photo of the bathroom in which Knox showered before calling the police, which appeared to show it drenched in blood, was published without an accompanying explanation — that it was taken after police had sprayed the bathroom with a blood-detection chemical that turns pink after a certain period of time, whether blood is present or not.
Local and international media also ran CCTV stills of Knox and Sollecito shopping in the days following the murder, chosen to show the brief moments in which they smiled or laughed with each other.
A leaked witness statement that described the pair buying G-strings and talking about going home to have "wild sex" turned out to have been provided by a shop owner who spoke little English, and a US journalist who visited the shop in question reported it didn't sell the type of items he described.
Meanwhile, journalists scoured Knox's online profiles for information, unearthing a picture of her posing with a vintage machine gun at a museum that she had uploaded to her Myspace page.
They also discovered her tongue-in-cheek nickname "Foxy Knoxy" — originally given to her by her youth soccer team — and it soon began appearing in headlines across the British press.
By the time the trial began, Knox had been publicly portrayed as a promiscuous libertine motivated by extreme thrills and sexual conquests, who was simultaneously cold, calculating and indifferent to the suffering of others.
Media interest in the case was intense — and prosecutors were determined not to disappoint.
They laid out a salacious story in which Knox, Sollecito and Guede had been high on drugs and engaging in a sex game on the night of the murder (an earlier theory that they had been taking part in an occult ritual was abandoned during the trial).
When Kercher refused to take part in the game, prosecutors said, Knox and Sollecito held her down while Guede raped her.
Knox then took a knife and inflicted the fatal wounds, they said, before staging a burglary to cover their tracks.
Young lovers found guilty
The pair's defence lawyers, on the other hand, pointed to the near-total lack of forensic evidence linking Knox and Sollecito to the murder.
No fingerprints, clothing fibres, hairs or skin cells from the pair were found at the scene, despite the close-quarters nature of the murder prosecutors had described (and the wealth of DNA evidence that pointed to Guede).
A knife taken from Sollecito's kitchen drawer with both Knox's and Kercher's DNA on it was determined by police to be the murder weapon — but forensic experts raised questions about whether it fit the profile given the size of Kercher's wounds, and raised the possibility of contamination, given the small amount of DNA involved.
A trace amount of Sollecito's DNA found on Kercher's bra clasp was similarly discounted by his defence team, who questioned how his DNA could have ended up on the clasp but not on the bra strap or anywhere else at the scene.
In Knox's case, rather than a murderer who was seeking sexual thrills, her lawyers painted a picture of a naive young woman who had raised the alarm, cooperated with investigators, and gave a false statement only after hours of questioning in a language in which she was not yet fluent.
They also pointed out that Knox had been friendly with Kercher, and highlighted the lack of any prior communications between Guede and the couple on trial.
Despite the absence of hard evidence linking them to the crime, Knox and Sollecito were convicted of murder and sexual violence in 2009, and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison respectively.
Knox was also convicted of staging a break-in at the apartment, as well as slander — in a separate but simultaneous trial — for her false accusation against Lumumba.
Knox, Sollecito and Guede were ordered to pay 1 million euros ($1,5 million) each to each of Kercher's parents, as well as 800,000 euros to each of her siblings.
Investigators made 'glaring errors'
Knox and Sollecito spent a total of four years in prison, where Knox was reportedly so scared during her first night that she had to be held by the female prison guards.
She later described experiencing an "epiphany" that allowed her to move past that fear and begin to focus on fighting her conviction.
"My epiphany was this: I was not, as I had assumed for my first two years of trial and imprisonment, waiting to get my life back. I was not some lost tourist waiting to go home," she wrote on X.
"I was a prisoner, and prison was my home.
"I want you to know that I'm OK because I'm not dead inside, I promise, and I don't want you to be dead inside," she wrote to her mother from Capanne Prison.
In November 2010, Knox and Sollecito's case came before the Corte d'Assise d'Appello, or appellate court — a standard practice in Italy, in which lower-court verdicts are assessed in what is essentially a second trial.
During the hearing, two prison inmates told the court that Guede had admitted to them that Knox was not involved in the killing.
Almost a year later, in October 2011, Knox and Sollecito's murder convictions were overturned and the pair were acquitted — an exonerating verdict in the Italian legal system, distinct from a finding that the case simply hasn't been proven.
Judge Claudio Hellmann poured scorn on the prosecution's case, citing "glaring errors" in the gathering and analysis of evidence, the lengthy and problematic nature of the interrogations, and credibility problems with a witness who had placed Knox and Sollecito near the scene.
After a review of the DNA evidence, he concluded the scientific tests conducted on Sollecito's kitchen knife were far below international standards, and the discovery of Sollecito's DNA on Kercher's bra clasp was the result of contamination, given investigators had worn the same latex gloves to touch Kercher's door handle and Kercher's clothes on the ground.
Knox and Sollecito were released from custody, and Knox immediately flew home to her parents in Seattle.
The nightmare continues
Unlike in the case of jury trials in Australian (or American) courts, a not guilty verdict in Italian courts is not the final adjudication of the matter.
Prosecutors are able to appeal, and the team prosecuting Knox and Sollecito did so immediately.
In 2013, the Corte Suprema di Cassazione, Italy's highest court, overturned Hellmann's acquittal of Knox and Sollecito and ordered a retrial on the basis that the judge failed to order new DNA tests or adequately consider the circ*mstantial evidence against Knox, such as her false accusation against Lumumba.
The retrial, carried out in Knox's absence at a Florentine appeals court, returned guilty verdicts against the pair in 2014, and saw Knox's sentence increased to 28 years and six months.
This was despite the fact that the only new evidence introduced at this trial — analysis of a previously unexamined sample taken from the kitchen knife — showed no DNA from Kercher.
Hellmann was critical of the decision, releasing a statement that accused the court of trafficking in fantasy.
"The Florence Appeal Court has written a script for a movie or a thriller book, while it should have only considered facts and evidence," he said.
Knox, still in the US, said the verdict was unjust, the result of a "prejudiced and narrow-minded investigation".
"Having been found innocent before, I expected better from the Italian justice system," she said.
She vowed to appeal the conviction once again, but said she had no intention of returning to Italy to serve out the remainder of her sentence, meaning Italy would have to request her extradition from the US should her appeal fail.
Sollecito, meanwhile, was barred from leaving Italy until the appeals process exhausted itself.
Though he always maintained Knox was innocent, he had sought a separate retrial from his former partner, on the basis that Knox's false statement to police, if a court held it to be true, did not place him at the scene.
Soon after the second guilty verdict, he was detained by police at a hotel near the border with Austria, though he denied trying to leave the country.
A definitive, and final, acquittal
In lodging their final appeal, Knox and Sollecito returned to the Corte Suprema di Cassazione, whose verdicts cannot be appealed.
It was the fifth time a court would pore over the details of the case, almost eight years after the murder took place.
In a sweeping decision, a five-judge panel ruled that the pair could not possibly have taken part in the murder due to the lack of any biological traces of them in Kercher's room or on her body.
The court said there had been "stunning flaws" in the police investigation at every stage, partly due to the pressure of the international media spotlight and prosecutors' resultant desperation to secure a conviction.
Italy's highest court had spoken, and there were no more moves the prosecution could make.
Knox told reporters outside her mother's Seattle home that she was "full of joy" at the news, but at the same time she was "still absorbing the present moment".
"Meredith was my friend," she said. "She deserved so much in this life."
Notably, the 2015 acquittal came with one last barb for Knox, with the court upholding her original conviction for slander, regarding her false statement against Lumumba.
The following year she was acquitted of a further defamation charge, for saying policewomen had struck her during her questioning.
Turning the tables on the press
In the years following her acquittal, Knox has become an author, journalist and a champion of the wrongly convicted.
In 2018 she began hosting a TV series called The Scarlet Letter Reports, which examined "the gendered nature of publish shaming", and soon afterwards she started a podcast, The Truth About True Crime.
She told the ABC's Sunday Extra podcast in 2021 that she wanted the authors of "inspired by a true story" crime fiction to understand that the stories they tell have an impact on real people.
"By taking that stance of, 'Well, it's inspired by but it's not exactly [what happened], it's fiction,' they are taking the stance that they don't have to be accountable to the truth," she said.
"I just showed up at my house one day and called the police. And then my world collapsed underneath me.
"The spotlight was turned on me against my desire, and I can't turn it off. I can't control that spotlight," she added.
"What I can do is hold up a mirror to it."
In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Italian government to pay Knox 18,400 euros for violating her rights in the hours after her arrest, by not providing her with a lawyer or a competent interpreter.
Based on that ruling, Knox later appealed her conviction for slander, seeking to overturn the last remaining stain on her name in the Italian legal system.
The Corte Suprema di Cassazione granted her a retrial in 2023, but on Wednesday, in the same Florentine courtroom where she was re-convicted of murder, she was found guilty once more.
She showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read out, but later vowed to continue to "fight for the truth" and appeal the ruling, ensuring her legal saga will continue.
"The police threatened me with 30 years in prison, an officer slapped me three times saying 'remember, remember'," Knox said in court, about her false statement incriminating Lumumba.
"I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police.
"I didn't know who the murderer was. I had no way to know."
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