Original subtitles

TRANSLATED FROM ITALIAN:

On November 2nd 2007, police in Perugia receive a phone call.

There's been a break-in.

When police arrive, they discover a young woman

has been stabbed to death.

She's Meredith Kercher, a British student,

a girl with everything to live for.

REPORTER: Amanda! Amanda!

For six years, her American flatmate, Amanda Knox,

has been the centre of a media and judicial storm,

one of three people accused of Meredith's murder.

Tonight, the central evidence for and against Amanda Knox.

And, for the first time,

the audio recording of Amanda Knox's prison interrogation.

HER VOICE BREAKS

Convicted, jailed, acquitted and now found guilty once more.

It's time, say the victim's family, for the case to be resolved.

We all definitely want some form of closure,

and then we can all start to remember just Meredith.

I was imprisoned as an innocent person.

This programme contains scenes some viewers may find upsetting.

Meredith Kercher grew up in Croydon, south London.

In August 2007, a new university year is about to start.

Meredith, now 21, prepares to leave for

the ancient and beautiful hilltop city of Perugia, Italy.

She was very excited about coming to Italy,

looking forward to learning more about Italian culture,

seeing the city of Perugia and making new friends.

She really fought to come here.

She really wanted to be here.

Mez, as everyone calls her,

is studying European politics and Italian at Leeds.

Now she has an exchange year in Italy,

a country she's been in love with since a school trip.

But saying goodbye to her sister Stephanie isn't easy.

We were just talking on the sofa and having a little cuddle goodbye,

and then I just remember her suddenly crying

and saying that she was going to be sad to go

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."

She leaves on September 1st,

and quickly afterwards moves into the upstairs flat of this cottage,

with three housemates - two young Italian trainee lawyers

and a student on exchange from the United States,

20-year-old Amanda Knox.

Amanda has travelled almost 6,000 miles from Seattle

on the Northwest coast to study Italian in Perugia.

Photogenic, outgoing and describing herself as quirky,

Amanda Knox loves the Beatles and Harry Potter.

She's been studying at university

and has worked three jobs to pay for her Italian adventure.

She is very different from the quiet and studious Meredith.

While housemates, there's said to be tension over Amanda's

supposedly casual attitude to sex, money and housework.

Within weeks, Amanda Knox lands a job in Perugia,

working as a waitress at Le Chic,

a pub owned by a popular musician from the Congo, Patrick Lumumba.

TRANSLATED: She gave me the impression of a good person.

If she wasn't a good person, she wouldn't have worked here.

That doesn't mean that her relationship with clients

pleased me, because she often talked to the clients

and I had to tell her to get back to work.

On October 25th,

Amanda and Meredith go to a classic musical concert together,

where Amanda meets Italian student Raffaele Sollecito.

He looks like her favourite, Harry Potter,

and the two begin a whirlwind romance.

Described by friends as intelligent and sensitive,

the handsome Raffaele has come to Perugia

to study information technology.

A week later - October 31st.

It's Halloween, and in Perugia,

like every other university town, it's party time.

It's one of Meredith's favourite nights out

and she's dressed as a vampire.

These will turn out to be among the last photographs of her alive.

Happy, full of life, and completely at home with her new friends.

What happens on the night of November 1st 2007

has been the subject of two trials,

three appeals and two supreme court judgments.

The story has more twists and turns

than the medieval streets of Perugia.

Police in Italy are searching for the killer

of a British exchange student who was found dead

in her apartment in Perugia.

Officers discovered the body of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher

in her bedroom yesterday afternoon.

The story starts at nine o'clock in the morning on 2nd November,

when a local woman finds two mobile phones in her garden.

She takes them to the postal police,

which handles crimes involving communication devices.

They quickly discover one of the phones is registered to

Via della Pergola 7, a small cottage just 500 metres away.

When police arrive here, they see two students in the driveway.

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.

They tell the police the front door is open...

and one room has been ransacked.

Police go into the house. One bedroom's a mess.

Clothes are all over the floor and a large rock is lying near the window.

Shortly after the postal police arrive,

at 12.51, Raffaele Sollecito calls the elite police force -

the Carabinieri.

He doesn't mention that the postal police are already there,

and says nothing's been stolen -

details prosecutors would later claim are significant.

TRANSLATED:

Meanwhile, Amanda says she's worried about her friend Meredith.

Her door's locked, she's not answering her phone.

When the door is broken down, they discover a beige duvet on the floor.

Beneath it, the battered and bloody body of Meredith Kercher.

Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini arrives just after 2pm.

He finds Meredith is partially naked,

her bra's been cut off and her t-shirt rolled up above her breasts.

It looks like a sexual assault.

TRANSLATED: When you start an investigation,

you don't know what happened,

you have to slowly reconstruct the situation.

Forensics teams work inside and outside the cottage.

Right away, they think it's a staged break-in -

glass shards are on top rather than underneath the scattered clothes.

The large rock seems too heavy to be thrown from the ground

to the first floor window

and too big to go through the small crack between the shutters.

A handbag, jewellery case, camera and laptop computer

are lying in full view.

There's a line of bloody shoe prints from Meredith's room

to the front door.

And in the bathroom, a bloody bare footprint is on the bathmat.

Over four days, investigators collect more than 400 items

from the apartment, photographing and filming their work.

When police bag Meredith's bra for evidence,

they notice something is missing.

Somehow, the investigators leave without the clasp -

a critical error that will haunt the prosecution case.

The autopsy shows Meredith has been strangled

and stabbed on two sides of the neck,

possibly with two different knives.

The second fatal stab severed her thyroid artery.

There are 40 wounds - too many, police believe,

for one assailant to have inflicted alone.

The prosecution's view of what happened,

later disputed by the defence, is shown in this reconstruction.

Meredith was trained in karate,

and must have encountered overwhelming force.

TRANSLATED: One person couldn't, all at the same time,

hold Meredith still and hold back her hands -

because there are very few defensive wounds -

inflict those wounds with a smaller knife

and then give her the fatal blow with the larger knife.

It is impossible. Not even Superman could do it.

The behaviour of Amanda Knox and her boyfriend attracts attention.

Meredith's friends tell police that, far from appearing distraught,

Amanda and Raffaele have been seen laughing and joking.

A vigil is held for Meredith, but Amanda and Raffaele don't attend -

they go for dinner at a friend's instead.

And the prosecutor recalls why he was concerned by Amanda's behaviour.

TRANSLATED: When the girls were brought to see the knives

that were in the kitchen, the reaction of Amanda...

It was a reaction... She put her hands on her ears, as if she were

trying to block out a terrible sound she was hearing in her ears.

It was like she was having a nervous breakdown.

And then there was this,

one of the defining images of the case -

Amanda and Raffaele kissing outside the cottage

where Meredith was murdered.

Her supporters say this was only natural.

Did they comfort each other?

We've seen that famous footage of the two of them together. They did.

What's wrong with any of that? Nothing.

It did appear to be wrong to some authorities.

November 5th. Four days after the murder.

Raffaele Sollecito is called in for questioning.

Amanda goes with him, and once again her behaviour seems odd.

She does yoga and the splits in the waiting room.

At this point, the couple's alibi appears to fall apart.

Amanda had told police she'd spent the night of the murder

at Raffaele's apartment.

They cooked, watched a film, made love, smoked marijuana

and went to bed.

But separately, Raffaele's story begins to change.

He's no longer sure if Amanda was with him all night.

Amanda's called in for more questioning.

As she is only a witness at this stage,

an interpreter is present but she has no legal representation.

What happens next is crucial,

and one of the most controversial twists in the story.

Police ask Amanda Knox about text messages on her phone.

In particular, a message from her boss, Patrick Lumumba.

TRANSLATED: "Don't come to work tonight." I sent that message.

It's, like, Sunday. "Don't come to work." I sent that message.

Amanda had texted back, "See you later."

She says she just meant "see you around",

but police now want to know...

had Amanda arranged to meet Lumumba later that evening

and taken him to her house?

At 1.45 in the morning, Amanda breaks down.

TRANSLATED: She says she had entered the house with him

because he was attracted to Meredith and wanted to be with Meredith,

and she stayed in the kitchen

and heard Meredith's screams, and HE was the assassin.

That's what she said.

Police believe Amanda Knox's story.

They raid Patrick Lumumba's home and take him in.

Within hours, his photo flashes around the world

as one of the murder suspects.

But for the police, Amanda Knox has now gone from witness to suspect.

If she's taken Lumumba to Meredith, she must have been at the house.

TRANSLATED: She put herself at the scene of the crime.

She admitted to accompanying Lumumba

as if she were an accomplice in his project.

She was in the room next door when the crime happened, in her version.

This fact pushed the police to suspend the audition

in order to protect her rights.

November 6th 2007.

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are arrested.

Waiting to be taken to jail,

Amanda makes another attempt to tell police what happened with Lumumba

by writing out an explanation in English.

"In my mind, I saw Patrick in flashes of blurred images.

"I saw him near the basketball court. I saw him at my front door.

"I saw myself cowering in the kitchen with my hands over my ears

"because, in my head, I could hear Meredith screaming.

"But I have said this many times, so as to make myself clear -

"these things seems unreal to me, like a dream.

"I want to make it clear that I am very doubtful

"of the verity of my statements

"because they were made under the pressure

"of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion."

But, despite her uncertainty, she doesn't retract her accusation.

Lumumba remains in jail, pleading his innocence.

In the city square,

members of the African community protest against his arrest.

TRANSLATED: The black man is always the thief and the assassin.

She wanted them to believe what she was saying.

It was just because I was black.

At this point, another African immigrant enters the story.

20-year-old Rudy Guede, from the Ivory Coast, is living in Perugia.

Detectives find his bloody thumbprint on a pillowcase

that was underneath Meredith's dead body.

Because he's an immigrant, they have his prints on file.

Police raid his tiny bedsit apartment

and test his toothbrush for DNA.

It matches traces found on Meredith's bra strap, on her body

and on the left sleeve of her pale-blue sweatshirt.

Rudy Guede has fled the country. He's arrested in Germany.

Perugia attorney Valter Biscotti volunteers to defend him.

TRANSLATED: I met this young man in this prison

in Schiffenstadt, Germany,

and he seemed to me like a guy who was scared,

someone who was in the middle of a story that was bigger than him.

He was surprised to see a lawyer

who arrived from Italy for him.

Extradited back to Italy,

Rudy Guede confirms to police that he's lived in the country

since the age of five.

A keen basketball player, he'd met Amanda and Meredith

after shooting hoops with students

who lived in the apartment below theirs.

They partied and smoked dope together.

Meanwhile, the case against Patrick Lumumba,

as outlined by Amanda Knox, collapses.

A customer at the bar has given him an alibi and he's freed.

How did Amanda Knox come to mention Lumumba's name to police?

For the first time, we can hear an audio tape

of her explanation to the prosecutor.

A transcript of this was presented in court, but not the audio.

Accompanied by three lawyers and an interpreter,

on December 17th 2007,

Knox is asked why she told police Lumumba committed the crime.

So what's the extent of the police evidence at this point?

It includes a knife found at Raffaele Sollecito's apartment

they believe could be the murder weapon.

But they need more, so return to the crime scene.

46 days after the murder, they find Meredith's bra clasp under a mat.

Using rubber gloves, they pick it up and inspect it.

It will become the most controversial piece of evidence

in the investigation.

The defence will claim the delay in collecting it

could have resulted in contamination.

Investigators also, for the first time, use luminol,

a chemical that highlights invisible blood stains.

Three clear footprints appear in the hallway,

plus other small bloodstains.

More new evidence, but it will be controversial.

In Seattle, the campaign to prove Amanda is innocent is underway.

Her family turn to a crisis communications firm

and a group called Friends of Amanda Knox.

It was just this kind of small group of people that were called

"the Americans" in our offence.

I think there was one quote that the Americans would send in

the marines to get Amanda Knox.

The campaign helps recast Amanda as a victim,

a young American girl being railroaded into an injustice

far away from home.

I love Italy. I've been to Italy.

And I have great respect for their courts.

I do think we have a rogue prosecutor.

In Italy, if you speak against the prosecution,

you can be prosecuted, so nobody can speak.

And it's a perfect storm of a potentially very unfair prosecution.

The prosecutor denies this accusation

and believes he personally has become the focus for criticism of

the prosecution case.

TRANSLATED: I don't know why, but I was the lightning rod in this case.

It was a personal attack.

Amanda Knox's DNA has been found mixed together with

Meredith Kercher's in five blood stains in the flat.

Plus, tests show the bare footprints match the size

and shape of Amanda's and her boyfriend's feet.

And the kitchen knife from Raffaele's apartment

shows Amanda's DNA on the handle

and a tiny trace of Meredith's DNA on the blade.

The clock spins forward almost one year, to September 2008.

Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito

and Rudy Guede appear before a judge in Perugia.

With so much publicity now surrounding Knox,

Guede opts to be tried quickly and separately.

TRANSLATION: I was convinced that if he had been tried with the others,

that with all the international media clamour and the international

pressure there would have been surrounding this trial,

they would have dumped all the blame on Rudy.

The prosecution's case is a tabloid editor's dream.

They say Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito

and Rudy Guede killed Meredith Kercher in a sex game gone wrong.

Guede denies this and pleads not guilty.

His defence is that he wasn't in the room when Meredith was murdered,

he was in the bathroom.

Meredith had invited him over, he said.

When he got there, Meredith was furious

because money was missing and she was blaming Amanda.

He says he comforted Meredith, and things got physical,

but they didn't have full sex.

He went to the toilet, then says he heard Amanda enter the apartment.

TRANSLATED: He heard Amanda's voice as she came in.

He was in the bathroom or just about to go into the bathroom,

and then he really did put on his headphones and listen to music,

rap I think, at full volume, and then heard a scream. He came out

and came up against a male figure.

Rudy Guede says this man lunged at him with a knife, cutting his hand.

He claims the attacker then yelled

"Black man found, black man condemned,"

and ran away.

Guede found Meredith bleeding in the other room.

He tried to stem the blood with towels,

and left a bloody thumbprint on the pillowcase.

But the bleeding didn't stop, and Guede says he panicked.

He tried to help her. He took her in his arms

and should have called help, but he was scared and ran away,

and he feels guilty for this.

Rudy Guede is found guilty of Meredith's murder

and sentenced to 30 years.

The judge's verdict says Rudy Guede did not act alone.

He's led away to prison.

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito will now stand trial

for the murder and sexual assault of Meredith Kercher.

January 16th 2009.

The trial begins.

The world's media is focused on Amanda Knox.

Her face fills the front pages.

Could this attractive, bubbly,

all-American girl be capable of murder?

As they did at Rudy Guede's trial, the prosecution again suggests

the murder was the result of a sex game gone wrong.

Again, this is strongly denied.

Amanda and Raffaele claim they weren't in the house that night.

To support their case, the prosecution produces evidence

they claim places the couple at the scene of the murder.

First, there's the DNA found in the bathroom.

The prosecution says it shows the mixed blood of Amanda Knox

and Meredith Kercher

in the bidet drain, the sink drain

and on a cotton bud box.

There is also a large drop of Amanda's blood on the bathroom tap.

According to the prosecutor,

this shows Amanda and Meredith were bleeding at the same time,

strong evidence there was a fight.

TRANSLATED: The principal evidence was mixed blood traces

from which were extracted mixed DNA of Amanda and Meredith.

The only explanation for that mix is that

Amanda was bleeding and touched objects

that were covered in Meredith's blood.

There's no other explanation.

But Amanda's lawyers say this proves nothing - two young students

living together means it's perfectly normal to find mixed blood

and DNA in the bathroom.

They say it's possible Amanda's DNA isn't from her blood at all

but from her saliva.

Sarah Gino is the forensic biologist on Amanda Knox's defence team.

TRANSLATED: In the case, the test was done for blood.

But was the test done for saliva?

No. So we can't know if inside that mixed trace there was blood

because it had been demonstrated, or just saliva.

Or maybe there was blood from both of them, but what does that mean?

Maybe someone had a bloody nose one time and then, at a another moment,

someone cut their finger and put it down, and their blood got mixed.

Then there was the kitchen knife

found in Raffaele's Sollecito's flat.

This, say the prosecutors, is the murder weapon,

which has been cleaned.

But they have found DNA of Amanda Knox on the handle

and a minuscule amount of Meredith Kercher's DNA on the blade.

But the words "too low" are written on the DNA reports for the knife.

The test should never have been carried out, say the defence,

there's not enough reliable DNA.

When questioned by journalists,

the prosecution stands by its forensic evidence.

TRANSLATED: It is not too little. The genetic profile is low,

but it is absolutely reliable.

In fact, we were able to get it,

which means there is no uncertainty about the attribution

of that profile to the victim.

More DNA evidence is presented, this time on Meredith's bra clasp.

Police says Raffaele Sollecito's DNA is on one of the hooks.

This is the only evidence placing him in her bedroom.

There is no DNA evidence that puts Amanda in the room.

David Balding, a DNA statistician at University College London,

is recognised as one of the world's leading analysts.

In 2012, he is asked by the Italian Forensic Association to study

Meredith Kercher's bra clasp and to give an independent view

on whether Sollecito's DNA is present.

His findings are not part of the court case.

When you just look at the evidence by eye, you can see very strongly

all of Raffaele Sollecito's DNA types are there

and that can't be explained by any kind of environmental contamination.

I calculate how likely is the evidence under

the prosecution assertion that DNA is there from Raffaele Sollecito

and again how likely it is without him being present.

And the former is much greater than the latter,

so that's when I say that's extremely strong evidence.

But forensic experts representing the defence remain adamant that

the bra clasp had been contaminated and is unreliable.

TRANSLATED: As far as the bra clasp is concerned, what happened?

This bra clasp was collected 46 days after the first crime scene

inspection, and a mixture of biological material was found.

There was a profile attributable to the victim, which is normal,

and other material that was attributable to Raffaele Sollecito.

There were other traces, but they were not attributed to anyone.

The defence also uses

the crime scene video to question the DNA evidence

presented by the prosecution.

I have looked at the crime scene... the videos.

Bloody shoe prints, cleaned up. Cleaned up, not saved.

A bra strap collected weeks and weeks

and weeks after the initial collection,

that now supposedly connects Amanda, Raffaele and Meredith.

But the prosecution keeps producing evidence they say connects

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito to the crime scene.

TRANSLATED: Amanda's footprints, which were revealed by the luminol,

showed DNA attributed to Meredith,

which means Amanda was walking in bare feet covered in blood.

They argue this is proof the couple came back during the night

to clean up and stage the break-in,

leaving bloodstained footprints in the bathroom and corridor.

The defence says there is no proof

the prints actually were bloodstains.

The luminol may have revealed another substance such as bleach.

The prosecution also presents evidence to challenge

the couple's story of what they did that night and the next morning.

They show Raffaele's cellphone was turned on at 6.02am,

despite the couple's claim they slept until ten.

Then there's the telephone call to the Carabinieri,

when Sollecito knew nothing had been stolen,

and failed to mention the postal police were at the scene.

They also question Raffaele Sollecito's changing alibi and

prison eyewitnesses who contradict Knox and Sollecito's stories.

In court, the prosecution accuses Amanda Knox of being

the leader of a sexual attack on Meredith.

They say this was payback for Meredith's disapproval

of Amanda's lifestyle.

TRANSLATED: The erotic game was always part of the case.

I think that night, Amanda wanted to make Meredith pay for judging her,

which she found offensive.

A girl from Seattle that worked three jobs to get to Italy

to study abroad, an honour student from Seattle Prep,

doesn't overnight, in my experience, turn into a depraved murderess.

Overnight.

The court's claims make difficult hearing for the Knox family.

Obviously, listening to those types of things were horrible.

It was an all-out attack on her character by individuals that

have no idea who she truly is as a person.

One of the things that we have tried to do this entire time is obviously

support Amanda by always having somebody over here,

somebody to visit her and stuff like that.

And we have to stay strong in order for her to stay strong.

Amanda Knox spends two days on the stand telling her

version of the story.

Millions worldwide watch her explanation of why

she put the pub owner Patrick Lumumba in the frame.

They told me that I was trying to protect someone...

INTERPRETER TRANSLATES INTO ITALIAN

..but I wasn't trying to protect anyone.

They continued to put so much emphasis...

..on this message that I had received from Patrick...

..and so I almost was convinced that I had met him.

Her case is this.

She was at Raffaele's house when the murder happened,

watching a movie and reading her e-mails.

She can't prove it because two of their three computers were

damaged when police tried to search the hard-drives.

Throughout the year-long trial, Meredith's family

fly in from London to testify and witness the key hearings.

They try to keep the focus on Meredith

and their quest for justice.

3rd December 2009. The eve of the verdict.

Amanda's family arrives to hear her plea for freedom.

She knows that she's innocent and has had nothing to do with this

and we're just very hopeful that the court will see

and be able to see that in the evidence that's been presented.

Amanda is now almost fluent in Italian.

323 days since the trial started.

The verdict is broadcast around the world.

Guilty of murder. 25 years for Raffaele Sollecito

and 26 for Amanda Knox,

the extra year for slandering Patrick Lumumba.

The Kerchers' Italian lawyer is satisfied.

TRANSLATED: The failed alibis, the behaviour of Sollecito and Knox,

Knox's statements, the slander of Patrick Lumumba.

These are all elements that, once put together,

allowed the determination of guilt.

But Knox's family are angry.

They keep tight-lipped as they leave the courtroom.

Push back, push back. Chris, Chris, stop it.

And when they return to Seattle,

they immediately start preparing her appeal.

There's not one piece of physical evidence

to link this girl to this crime.

They draft legal, forensic, media

and political support from the US and Italy

to strengthen the defence team.

It takes a year to get to the appeal.

By now, Knox and Sollecito have been in jail for three years.

This time, there's a new judge and a new prosecutor,

Giancarlo Costagliola.

TRANSLATED: Despite the fact that there had already

been a conviction, the deputy judge

said at the beginning of the hearing that the only thing that was certain

was that a girl was dead.

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito's defence teams decide to

focus on Rudy Guede.

They call prison inmates, convicted criminals, to testify that

Guede has confessed to them in prison.

June 27th 2011.

Rudy Guede takes the stand.

By now, after an appeal, his sentence has been cut

from 30 to 16 years.

He denies he made a jailhouse confession

and is asked about a letter he has written claiming Amanda Knox

and Raffaele Sollecito killed Meredith.

The key focus of the appeal is on the DNA -

Knox and Kercher's DNA on the knife, Sollecito's on the bra clasp.

Is it enough to place the defendants at the crime scene or not?

The court appoints independent experts Carla Vecchiotti

and Stefano Conti from the University of Sapienza, Rome,

to review the science.

Their report is scathing about prosecution forensic methods.

They cite US manuals and standards, highlighting errors made

when the evidence was collected.

They do find a new trace of DNA on the knife from Sollecito's

kitchen that hasn't been tested.

However, they argue, it's too small to be of use.

This report helps the judge focus his decision on

whether there is reasonable doubt about the DNA samples.

For Meredith's mother

and the rest of her family, the hearings are agonising.

Everything that Meredith must've felt that night,

everything she went through, the fear and the terror,

and not knowing why...

And she didn't deserve that.

No-one deserves that.

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito await their fate

for the second time.

Not guilty.

She will be freed, she will be going back to

Seattle, Washington, at the end of her four-year ordeal.

There's sufficient reasonable doubt for Amanda Knox

and Raffaele Sollecito to be released immediately.

I'm Deanna Knox, Amanda Knox's sister,

and I have a few words on behalf of our family.

We are thankful that Amanda's nightmare is over.

She has suffered for four years for a crime that she did not commit.

TRANSLATED: It is evident that Raffaele had nothing to do

with the murder of that poor girl, Meredith Kercher,

who remains in our heart.

Some in the gathering crowd becoming increasingly

agitated about the verdicts.

TRANSLATED: There were people out on the stairs

in front of the courthouse,

and for a long time they yelled, "Shame on you!"

SHOUTING

A dark sedan ferries Amanda Knox away to a safe house

deep in the Italian countryside for an emotional reunion

with relatives after almost four years in jail...

..while Meredith's family is left stunned and pained by the acquittal.

Meredith has been almost forgotten in all of it.

The media photos aren't really of her.

There is not a lot about what actually happened in the beginning,

so it's very difficult to keep her memory alive in all of this.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The media's photos will be of Amanda Knox arriving home

at Seattle Airport.

I'm really overwhelmed right now.

I was looking down from the aeroplane

and it seemed like everything wasn't real. Erm...

What's important for me to say is just thank you to everyone who has

believed in me...

who has defended me, who has supported my family.

Um...

Amanda finds a home in Seattle's International District and returns

to the University of Washington to study creative writing.

She starts writing a book about her experience,

reportedly receiving a 4 million advance,

although claims that all of the money goes on legal expenses.

Back in Italy, Rudy Guede is still in prison,

where he's been beaten up by inmates.

He's begun studying to build himself a future

and will soon be eligible for parole.

His lawyer claims that Rudy Guede has been made a scapegoat.

TRANSLATED: I am convinced Rudy is innocent.

Rudy was lynched by the media.

He was the weakest link.

He was the weak one who had to pay for them all.

In the sentence, it says he is not the actual murderer.

It says he didn't handle the knife,

or anything, but because the judge found

he took part in the group violence, he is guilty.

For a while, this seems like the end of the story,

but fate, or the Italian justice system, has another twist in store.

Now it's the turn of the prosecution to appeal,

and on 26th March 2013,

Italy's highest court, known as the Court of Cassation,

orders a new trial,

overturning Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito's acquittals.

They say the first appeal did not debate many of the 10,000 pages

from the first trial, focusing too much on the DNA evidence.

TRANSLATED: The Court of Cessation was very, very harsh.

It commented on the lack of logic, the lack of coordination

in the reasoning. It was severe, almost devastating, for the judges.

September 30th 2013,

the second appeal begins.

This time,

the drama switches to the birthplace of the Renaissance - Florence.

Amanda Knox isn't in the courtroom.

She refuses to travel from America,

and defends her decision on television.

I look at it as an admission of innocence, to be quite honest,

because, I mean, besides the fact that there are

so many factors that are not allowing me to go back, financial ones,

ones where I'm going to school,

ones where I want the court to proceed without distraction, it's...

I was imprisoned as an innocent person, and that...

It's common sense not to go back.

Only Raffaele Sollecito is present in court.

He makes a plea to the judge and jury.

Unlike in the appeals court, this judge orders a police forensics lab

in Rome to test the new trace of DNA found on the kitchen knife.

It's a minuscule amount from where the blade meets the handle.

The new test finds that the DNA matches Amanda Knox.

Prosecutors say it further proves her involvement in the murder,

but the defence says the most likely explanation is that Amanda

used the knife when staying at Raffaele's apartment.

Six years and two months after Meredith Kercher's murder,

the second appeal of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito

is coming to a close,

the judgment watched by the world.

Sollecito doesn't wait to hear the verdict, speeding off in a taxi.

Amanda Knox stays in the United States,

plagued by the same fears she shared on television.

I thought about what it would be like to live my entire life in prison,

and to lose everything, to lose what I've been able to come back to

and rebuild. I think about it all the time. And it's so scary.

Everything's at stake.

Shortly after 9.30pm local time,

after deliberating for more than 12 hours,

the judge and jury enter the hall.

Within the past hour, an Italian court of appeal has reinstated

the convictions of the American citizen Amanda Knox and her former

Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of...

This time, an even longer sentence.

28 years and six months for Amanda Knox,

25 years for Raffaele Sollecito.

The lawyers give their verdict.

TRANSLATED: This trial has been media driven.

Everything has been amplified.

These kids were taken to prison four days after the body was found.

They were the first suspects. And they never lost that image.

TRANSLATED: If it was a media-driven trial,

it's not due to the Kercher family, who have been absolutely silent.

So, if we are talking about a media circus,

we need to look at the behaviour of the suspects and their followers.

In court, the victim of Amanda Knox's original slander,

Patrick Lumumba, is relieved.

He's been awarded 40,000 euros' compensation.

Raffaele Sollecito has disappeared.

But the next day, police find him near the Austrian border.

His lawyers say he wasn't trying to flee the country.

He's expected to remain free until his final appeal.

Back in Florence, Meredith's sister and brother face the media

and are asked if they think Amanda Knox should be

extradited from America to Italy.

If somebody's found guilty and convicted of a murder,

if an extradition law exists between those two countries,

then I don't see why they wouldn't.

I imagine it would set a difficult precedent if a country

such as the US didn't choose to go along with laws that they themselves

uphold when extraditing convicted criminals from other countries.

It probably leaves them in a strange position not to.

Knox and Sollecito will appeal one last time.

Then, if the verdict is upheld, Italy will decide

whether to request Amanda Knox's extradition.

It's not the end of it.

It's another chapter, moving things forward.

Anybody losing anyone close to them is hard.

Losing somebody so young and the way that we did is, obviously,

100 times worse. And then on top of that,

to have all the media attention that has gone on for so long

just makes it very, very difficult to cope with.

Even if the guilty verdicts are upheld on appeal,

Amanda Knox has vowed to keep fighting to clear her name.

After her conviction, she releases a written statement saying

she is frightened and saddened by this unjust verdict,

followed by this photograph which reads, "We are innocent."

I think we all definitely want some form of closure,

even just having it almost at an end

of the Italian justice system,

and knowing that that's the final decision,

and then we can all start to remember just Meredith,

rather than focusing on who did it or what happened.

Six years have passed since the death of Meredith Kercher.

So, are Amanda Knox

and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito guilty?

On January 30th 2014, the Italian justice system said yes.

But with another appeal in the pipeline,

the hard reality for Meredith's family

is that their ordeal is still not over.