Such was the media storm surrounding the murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007, that Amanda Knox – the American roommate wrongly convicted of the killing, and star of Hulu’s new drama about the case – recently admitted she still gets mistaken for Kercher in the street.
"The identity of Meredith and me is so intertwined in [that person's] mind that they don't actually know who died and who lived," Knox, now 38, a mother-of-two and an advocate for criminal justice reform, explained in a candid podcast interview earlier this year. "We're just the same in their brain."
The interview was part of a global media campaign as Knox attempts to “reclaim” her story through a series of interviews, biographies and TV appearances, culminating in the release of a star-studded new Hulu and Disney+ drama starring the likes of Grace Van Patten and Sharon Horgan.
The eight-part miniseries, titled The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, launches on Hulu and Disney+ on August 20, and hype among true crime fans is at fever pitch. Not only is Knox herself the executive producer – she says she hopes her new book and TV series can be “healing” for Kercher’s family – but her co-producer is no other than Monica Lewinsky, whose own story of being a young woman at the centre of a sex scandal with then-US president Bill Clinton was turned into a Disney-backed series in 2021. Knox calls her a fellow member of the “Sisterhood of Ill Repute”.
Together, the pair attempt to tell the story of Kercher’s killing through Knox’s eyes: her wrongful conviction for the murder, her four years in an Italian prison, and her years-long journey to free herself. Kercher’s murderer was eventually identified as Rudy Guede, a small-time drug trafficker from the Ivory Coast with a history of break-ins, after his DNA was found on her body. He was freed from prison in 2021 having served 13 years of a reduced 16-year sentence. “For 15 years I’ve been defined by something that I didn’t do,” Grace Van Patten, the actress playing Knox, tells viewers in the trailer. “Many people think they know my story. But now, finally, it’s my turn to tell it.”
Knox is right in believing many fans think they know her story already. Even the loosest of followers of the Knox-Kercher saga can probably reel off a list of headlines from the time of her trial. That she was the extroverted American roommate, that her relationship with Kercher was reportedly distant or strained, and that the prosecution attempted to paint her as a sex-crazed psychopath who killed Kercher in a drug-fuelled-orgy-gone-wrong are among the varying and salacious claims made about the then-20-year-old at the time.
Far less, however, is known about Kercher, the Surrey-born Leeds University student who was 21 years old when she was found dead in her bedroom in the Italian town of Perugia, semi-naked and with multiple stab wounds and signs of sexual assault. Her name only appears once in the trailer for the upcoming Hulu series, and very few docuseries or podcast episodes have featured her name in the 17 years since her killing – something Knox, whose name has become shorthand for the case, has called out in the past. “Meredith’s name is often left out, as is Rudy Guede’s,” she posted on X in 2021 after being released from jail.
But Kercher’s family believe Knox herself is part of the problem. “This continuous stirring is a demonstration of a lack of sensitivity,” their lawyer said of the Hulu drama last year, making it clear they didn’t want the series to be produced. Kercher’s sister Stephanie recently told the Guardian – the newspaper her father wrote for before his death – that she finds it “difficult to understand” the purpose of the series, and her late mother Arline previously spoke of the “life sentence” of grief she and her family had been subjected to, raising difficult questions about the ethics of shows that bring cases like this back into the public discourse.
So is Hulu’s drama simply a chance for a wrongly-jailed innocent woman to set the record straight – or is it taking attention away from the victim? Where are Kercher’s family all these years on? And who was Kercher, the innocent woman at the centre of this story – what do we know of her life before she was killed?
As Knox’s version of events hits the small screen, this is Kercher’s story.
A Leeds student from south London who dreamed of being a journalist
There is a tragic sort of irony about the fact that Meredith Kercher dreamed of working in the media in the years before her death, given the media storm that ensued after her shocking killing. Her family say she wanted to work as a journalist or for the European Union when she moved to Perugia in Italy in August 2007, and friends – who knew her as “Mez” – say she was bright, popular, caring and witty.
There is also a tragic sort of irony around the reason she chose to study in Perugia in the first place. The Leeds University student was 21 at the time and in her third year of a four-year European Studies degree when she enrolled in a modern history, politics and cinema course in the small Italian university city on a hilltop in Umbria. Almost a fifth of the city’s inhabitants are students and her late father John, a journalist and author of 24 children's books, later said she deliberately chose Perugia over Milan or Rome because she thought it would be safer.
The 21-year-old had spent a summer living with an Italian family in Campania at the age of 15 and was keen to experience living abroad again, apparently, after growing up in the suburb of Coulsdon in south London, where she attended the £10,000-a-year girls school Old Palace School in Croydon. Her parents John and Arline divorced when their four children were young and reports say Arline, a petite woman who was born in Pakistan and raised in India, raised Meredith and her three older siblings John, Lyle and Stephanie in a “ramshackle” family home with faded curtains and gutters hanging perilously from the roof.
"She was very excited about coming to Italy, looking forward to learning about Italian culture. Seeing the city of Perugia and making new friends. She really fought to be here. She wanted to be here,” her sister Stephanie later recalled. "We were just talking on the sofa and having a little cuddle of goodbye, and I just remember her suddenly crying and saying she was going to be sad but she was excited to come and I remember being quite taken aback and I thought: 'Don't make me sad. I'll miss you but you'll go and have fun."
And have fun she did. Kercher stayed close with her family during university, calling her mother daily. She settled into the Umbrian city quickly, apparently, making friends with the locals and dating fellow student Giacomo Silenzi, her Italian neighbour,.
"She was such a genuine person that when you think of her now and see her friends, you don't need to say anything, you only need to smile,” her sister Stephanie later told a press conference in Perugia a year after the killing. "As anyone who was lucky enough to have known her would testify, she was one of the most beautiful, intelligent, witty and caring people you could wish to meet. Nothing was ever too much effort for her.”
Her brother Lyle echoed these sentiments at Kercher’s funeral near the family home in Croydon. "All her friends and family can look back and remember Mez for her endearing qualities such as her quick wit and fantastic sense of humour."
Two flatmates from opposite sides of the world – and opposite in character
Chalk and cheese. This was how Silenzi, 24, the Italian student Kercher was dating at the time of her death, described Kercher and her American flatmate Knox.
The two women shared a four-bed apartment in a two-storey cottage-style building just outside Perugia’s historic centre. Four young Italian men lived in the apartment downstairs, while Knox and Kercher shared the upper-floor apartment with two Italian women, both lawyers-in-training.
"The two were like chalk and cheese - totally opposite in character," Silenzi said of the Knox and Kercher. "Meredith was calm, sweet and shy. Amanda was an extrovert and always showing off."
Knox, who was dating an Italian man called Raffaele Sollecito at the time, has spoken fondly of her short time as Kercher’s flatmate. She later reminisced about going thrift shopping, baking cookies and visiting a local chocolate festival together.
But there are also reports that the pair had fallen out shortly after moving in. According to testimonies from friends and their other flatmates, Kercher didn’t approve of Knox not following the cleaning rota, and had complained about Knox leaving her vibrator on display in their shared bathroom – claims that would later be used against Knox as part of what she calls a “global vilification” and a campaign to paint her as a “dirty maneater”.
The tabloids quickly picked up on her high-school nickname ‘Foxy Knoxy’ and the prosecution in her 2009 trial put forward a lurid theory that Knox had killed her flatmate because she refused to take part in a drug-fuelled group “sex game” with her and her then-boyfriend Sollecito – a theory she has consistently and firmly denied.
The night of November 1, 2007
"The way I think about [Meredith] today is that we were two sides of the same coin, and fate just flipped the coin, and it just so happened that she came home that night, and not me," Knox said in 2013 on believing it could have just as easily been her who was killed on the night of November 1, 2007, in Kercher’s place.
Whether that is true or not will never be known. What is known is that Kercher had been out with friends – a dinner with three other English women, apparently, followed by a night-out for Halloween – on the night in question, a public holiday in Italy, and had returned home to an empty house. Her two Italian housemates were out of town, and Knox was staying over at her boyfriend’s flat.
It was Knox who walked in on a crime scene when she returned home the next morning, finding the front door open and drops of blood in the bathroom. Kercher’s bedroom door was locked, Knox initially assuming she was still asleep.
She showered, then noticed a broken window and faeces in the bathroom toilet. "It's very odd. I've just come back to the house and the door is open. I had a shower but there's blood everywhere," she reportedly told one of her Italian housemates over the phone.
Her boyfriend, Sollecito, came round and attempted to enter Kercher’s bedroom. At 12.51pm, they alerted police, who knocked the door down to find Kercher’s body wrapped in a duvet. She’d been sexually assaulted, stabbed and her throat had been cut – a killing that would go on to be catapulted onto front pages across the world for decades to come.
Every parent’s worst nightmare – then a 17 year media frenzy
Back in the UK, news began circulating that a female British student had been found murdered in Perugia. “...I call Meredith...the phone rings on and on, and still there is no answer,” her father John later recalled in his 2012 book ‘Meredith: Our Daughter's Murder and the Heartbreaking Quest for the Truth’.
Eventually, a reporter called him. "I shall never forget her words,” he wrote. “‘The name going around Italy,’ she says, 'is Meredith.'"
Kercher’s mother Arline later described what happened to her daughter as “every parent’s nightmare… of something so terrible happening, when basically she was in the safest place, her bedroom." Her sister Stephanie echoed this: "Everything that Meredith must have felt that night. Everything she went through. The fear and the terror and not knowing why. She didn't deserve that. No one deserves that.”
What followed was one of the most sensationalised trials of the 2000s, with years of public scrutiny and media frenzy, and multiple convictions and appeals. Guede, Knox, and Sollecito were all arrested in the days after Kercher’s murder but while Guede opted for a fast-track trial and was convicted for murder and sexual assault the following year, Knox and Sollecito faced a full trial beginning in 2009.
It was every parent’s nightmare… of something so terrible happening, when she was in the safest place, her bedroom
Both were convicted, spending four years in an Italian prison before being acquitted by Italy’s highest court in 2015, citing serious investigative errors. That same year, Knox was separately convicted of slander for falsely accusing Italian investigator Giuliano Mignini of fabricating evidence, for which she was sentenced to several months in prison but later paid a fine. She and Sollecito were released from jail on March 27, 2015 – two years after releasing her first memoir, Waiting To Be Heard, and the start of a worldwide media campaign. Within a year she had featured on the likes of CBS News and in a Netflix documentary about her version of events – decisions the Kercher family, who kept a relatively low profile after the killing, made clear they found upsetting.
"It's all been about Knox - not justice for my daughter," father John Kercher wrote while Knox was behind bars in 2012, the same year his family released photos charting Meredith’s development from a shy two-year-old to an attractive and sociable young Leeds University student. For many years after the killing, he and the family made it clear they believed Knox and Sollecito had been involved in Meredith’s murder. "We knew Meredith had not got on with Knox,” John wrote after attending his daughter’s trial in 2010. He had reportedly suffered a stroke earlier that year, while his ex-wife Arline missed much of the trial because she couldn’t afford the airline tickets and hotel costs, and because she needed kidney dialysis in London three times a week.
"Mez has been forgotten in all of this," Stephanie said in 2014, adding that it had become “very difficult” to honour her sister’s memory amid the media storm surrounding Knox. "The media photos aren't really of her. There's not a lot about what actually happened in the beginning. So it is very difficult to keep her memory alive in all of this."
Knox was absolved of her late roommate’s murder in 2015 and the Kercher’s lawyer spoke of their “shock” and “great sense of bitterness” at the time. “We are now obviously left wondering who is the other person or people... for us it feels very much like being back to square one,” brother Lyle, who worked in advertising in London at the time, explained following the decision. “That’s the biggest disappointment, not knowing still,” sister Stephanie said. For them, the quest for truth – the title of their father’s 2012 book – still wasn’t over.
John Kercher later explained he found the acquittal “staggering”. “Hundreds of miles away from the centre of the events, I sat stunned and open-mouthed…” he wrote. For him and the rest of his family, the biggest frustration appeared to be the idea that Guede could not have acted alone (prosecutor Giuliano Mignini claimed evidence from the murder showed “coordination and involvement of more than one person”). If Knox and Sollecito hadn’t been his accomplices, who had?
That frustration continued for years. “I swear I do not understand why the case cannot be reopened…,” Stephanie said seven years later, in 2022. “Rudy Guede did not act alone. If he is responsible in conjunction with others, why not look for those others?... I feel disappointed with Italian justice… time does not lessen the pain and I remain frustrated and dissatisfied.”
The following year, they expressed their frustration once again, this time at Knox’s return to Italy to meet her prosecutor Mignini – an unexpected meeting that made headlines at the time and features prominently in the upcoming Hulu drama. "All these insistences and appearances are only ever done to keep the attention on herself,” John Kercher said in an interview with the Guardian in 2013, calling the trip “inappropriate” and “very painful”. “The murder is a tragic memory for the Kercher family, they lost their daughter and sister in such a terrible way. It’s also an injustice for them as they still don’t know the full truth.”
This search for truth, and the resulting 17-year media circus, clearly took its toll on the family. "Anybody losing anyone close is hard,” Lyle told a BBC documentary in 2014. “Losing someone so young and the way we did is obviously 100 times worse, and on top of that to have all the media attention that has gone for so long makes it very difficult to cope with.”
Two deaths, new allegations and the siblings living a “life term”
For Knox, 2020 marked a turning point in her quest to reclaim the years she had lost to the trial and her time in jail. It was the year she married her now-husband, the writer Christopher Robinson, who she’d met five years previously and wed in a space-themed ceremony which they crowdfunded for via donations from family and friends.
For the Kercher siblings, it was the start of a new and painful chapter of loss, after their two parents John and Arline passed away just four months apart. According to reports, John, 77, was found on a road close to his Croydon home with two fractured legs, a broken arm and a head injury in January 2020. He died in hospital three weeks later, with an inquest unable to conclude if he had died from a hit-and-run incident. His ex-wife Arline, 74, reportedly died at a hospital in Carshalton just months later, during an early phase of the Covid pandemic in May.
Losing both our parents within just four months of each other brought its own tragedy but we can take some solace in knowing that they are now united with Mez and no longer have to live with the grief which consumed them
"Losing both our parents within just four months of each other in early 2020 brought its own tragedy but we can take some solace in knowing that they are now united with Mez and no longer have to live with the grief which consumed them,” Meredith’s three siblings wrote in November that year, in a tribute to mark the 15th anniversary of their sister’s death. "Every anniversary of Meredith's death gives us pause for thought, but of course as with anyone who has lost a loved one - especially in such tragic circumstances - it does not take an anniversary to remember them; it's something you carry with you every day. Fifteen years has passed in the blink of an eye but yet we have lived a lifetime in between - something Meredith sadly, was never afforded.”
The three of them weren’t to know it then, but 12 months later they would receive yet more shocking news: their sister’s killer, Guede, now 38, was released from jail having served 13 years of his 16-year sentence. Just two years after that, in December 2023, he was handed a restraining order after an ex-girlfriend accused him of mistreatment and physical and sexual violence – allegations he was formally charged for last month.
Knox, who now lives with her husband and two children in Seattle, Washington, says the relative lack of coverage of Guede’s latest charges is a perfect reflection of the wider story at large. "No one cares," she said of Guede’s latest alleged crime. "I think that is so indicative of what was going on at the time and has always been going on with this case."
The now-38-year-old, who works as an activist and reportedly earned around £3.5 million for her first memoir, has also spoken openly about her relationship with the Kerchers in recent years. That she has reached out several times but not heard back; that she thinks the family still believe she is withholding something about the murder; and that she still hopes for a reconciliation are among her public claims since being freed. "We experienced something very traumatic together, it would be very nice and I think very healing for us to communicate about that,” she said earlier this month. “But when it all comes down to it, their grief is real and all-encompassing and my feelings about my own grief don't demand anything of them. I just want them to know that… I do want to reconcile with them."
Siblings John, Lyle and Stephanie have never confirmed or denied Knox’s attempts to reach out – but they have spoken about their frustration with the ongoing media attention. “We’ve already spoken about this case too much and at a certain point you have to close the chapter… This continuous stirring is a demonstration of a lack of sensitivity,” their lawyer Francesco Maresca told The Times last year of Knox’s upcoming Hulu drama. Stephanie echoed this early this year, saying she found it “difficult to understand” how the drama “serves any purpose”.
The series launches on Hulu next week, and Guede’s trial begins in Rome this coming November. Until then, the Kercher siblings’ torment continues. It was their late mother Arline who called the grief of losing Meredith a “life sentence”. With her and her late husband John now passed, their three remaining adult children are now left to carry that sentence out by themselves.
