In the Season 2 premiere, Amanda Knox joined Sam & Amy to tell her story as she has never told it before. Amanda experienced the unthinkable, spending almost four years in an Italian prison following her wrongful conviction for the 2007 murder of her study abroad roommate Meredith Kercher. Read on for an excerpt from Part 1 of their discussion, and then be sure to check out Part 2, dropping on the podcast tomorrow — trust us, you don’t want to miss it.
Sam:
I think for most people who think of spending a semester abroad, right, you had really fought your family for the opportunity to go abroad and it was going to be financially difficult. And it was to be a huge departure from your life as a university student, but they really embraced your adventure. Could you share with us what your experience was in terms of when you got to Italy and what you were expecting?
Amanda:
So, one thing is that I grew up in a multi-cultural household, in the sense that my mom was born in Germany. My Oma is my Oma. She’s like, I technically am a born-and-raised American, but I grew up eating, you know, Gulla and relain and Kuo. And so I had an appreciation for the fact that there are other places and other kinds of people and other ways of living and other foods and other languages out there in the world. I never had this sense of, oh, the entire world eats hamburgers and speaks English. So I understood and appreciated that the world was way bigger than what I had access to necessarily in my own small ecosystem that I grew up in. And my family also really supported me exploring my heritage, but also just the curiosity of other people’s and other languages and other places.
And so when we, when I decided that I wanted to study abroad, they were really happy for me. They were also concerned because I had grown up in an environment where my entire extended family was right next to me within walking distance. And that I had not really ever had experience living alone before — this was, you know, like even when my parents had talked about me studying abroad, the idea was that I would go stay with my aunt in Germany and then I would go to school. Like we had been talking about me going and potentially spending a year of high school in Germany and living with my aunt. So it wasn’t so much the other place that was the scary part. It was, Amanda’s a 20-year-old sheltered kid and she’s going to go live by herself for the first time.
Sam:
Could we talk for a moment about your apartment? Because I thought that the way you describe your sister, Dean and you going ahead and finding your apartment and then visiting your aunt and, it seemed like when you were going to arrive there, everything would be set. And even the way you described your apartment was so idyllic. Can you share a little bit about the, the situation you had set up for yourself?
Amanda:
Yeah, I mean, it was idyllic and it did feel like everything was falling into place in a really perfect way because as like, you know, the first time I went and visited the school that I was going to be studying at right outside was a young woman who was putting up her phone number for a room for rent, and I immediately just talked to her straight away and she said, oh yeah, the room’s right over here, just a few steps away from the university. It’s this like beautiful little cottage that’s overlooking the valley and you can see all the, we have fig trees in the garden and I was like, good. Okay. Like, that’s amazing. Sure. And like, we had coffee and hit it off and, and immediately right then and there, made an agreement for me to stay.
So as soon as I told them that I was gonna go back, and stay a few more weeks with my aunt and then come back to Peru when the semester started. And they said, great, sounds good. We’ll see you then. And while I was away with my aunt, after I had made the agreement with them, that’s when they met Meredith. And she took the other bedroom that the one that was slightly larger and overlooking the valley. And it really was this ideal situation because not only was I close to the university, not only was I in this beautiful house, but I was also surrounded by people who were just the right kinds of people for me to be around. Like there was another foreign exchange student, but also there were these two Italian women who were young women who could, you know, give us the lay of the land a little bit.
And I remember talking to one about, like, should I buy Italian shoes? And she was like, heck yeah, go to this place. And so I went and bought some Italian boots because she recommended them, it was truly an ideal situation. And I felt very lucky, but then six weeks later, the unthinkable happened. Six weeks after I arrived and moved in and everything was going great. You know, me and the roommates made friends with the guys who lived in the apartment downstairs from us in the cottage. We went out dancing, we had dinners, Meredith and I went grocery shopping together. All of that was plugging along wonderfully. And then Halloween rolled around and I was hanging out with Raffaele Sollecito, a guy that I had met days before.
And Meredith had gone out with her British friends to go out dancing. The next day, November 1st, I was hanging out with Meredith in our, you know, sort of like kitchenette main shared area. She was telling me about how she was gonna go watch a movie with her friends and, and hang out. And I made plans to go with Raffaele to visit a local town that was nearby. And I left and spent the night with Raffaele. The next I come home and find that my house is a crime scene because a local burglar broke into our home and slowly over the course of the day, I realize that not only has our house been broken into, but Meredith has been murdered. And that is, it was the most surreal experience because the last thing that I thought would happen to me or anyone around me was that someone would get hurt, that someone would be brutally raped and murdered.
To hear the rest of the interview, head over to the What’s Her Story With Sam & Amy podcast — Part 2 drops tomorrow!
