When Meredith Kercher’s family first heard the news last year that Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito had had their convictions for the Briton’s murder reinstated, they looked ahead to the day when the verdict might be made final by Italy’s highest court.
“Nothing of course will ever bring Meredith back,” her brother Lyle said at the time. “The best we can hope for is, of course, finally bringing this whole case to a conclusion, and then everyone can move on with their lives.”
On Friday night the long-running case appeared to have been brought to a conclusion after more than seven years of twists, turns and retrials. But it was not the conclusion the Kercher family would have wished for or expected.
Arline Kercher, Meredith’s mother, said tonight she was “surprised and very shocked” by an Italian court’s decision to overturn the convictions of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.
Throughout the saga that has followed the 21-year-old Leeds University student’s murder, the family has sought to stay out of the spotlight and, before Friday night’s verdict, had expressed steady confidence in Italy’s notoriously slow and backed-up legal system, saying that the multiple tiers of appeals were designed to arrive at the right verdict.
Whether that faith would remain solid after the court of cassation’s ruling, however, was unclear. On Friday night the family’s lawyer, Francesco Maresca, told the Guardian there would be no statement made immediately. They were not understood to be in Rome for the verdict.
Although they have always been careful not to personalise the legal battle, the family may well find the definitive clearing of both Knox and Sollecito hard to fathom. An earlier verdict by the court of cassation, which found Rudy Guede, an Ivorian, definitively guilty of Kercher’s murder, specified that the murder could not have been carried out by him alone, and that he must have had accomplices.
How, therefore, the only people who have ever been seriously considered suspects in the case are now to walk free – for good – as a result of the same court is likely to be a bitter pill for the family to swallow.
Previously in the case, observers have said the Kerchers often felt outmaneuvered by what they called Knox’s “PR machine”.
In an article in Newsweek, reporter and author Barbie Latza Nadeau described how the media’s insatiable appetite for “Foxy Knoxy” had pushed Kercher, the British victim, off the front page.
“The American TV networks, especially, were generous to the Knox family, paying for airline tickets and meals when trials were in session. On the night of one of the verdicts, a high-powered American producer even babysat Knox’s little sisters in exchange for God only knows what,” she wrote.
Amid the media frenzy, Kercher’s sister, Stephanie, told reporters in 2011 that she feared “Meredith has been almost forgotten in all this”.
And last year, she admitted the family may never be given the answers they so badly want. “I think we’re still on a journey to the truth,” she said. “It may be we don’t ever really know what happened that night and that’s something we’ll have to come to terms with.”
