Angel Face by Barbie Latza Nadeau

for Newsweek.
     
     
    THE PUSH-BACK FROM SEATTLE was ferocious, but the message discipline was imperfect. When Bremner told CNN that Amanda needed the U.S. State Department to rescue her, Marriott would simply quip, “Anne
doesn’t speak for the family” or “I don’t keep up with what Anne is doing.” Moreover, Amanda’s Seattle supporters began to compromise the work of her legal team in Perugia. On August 12, 2008, Seattle judge Michael Heavey wrote a letter titled “Request to transfer the trial against Amanda Knox out of Perugia,” using Superior Court of the State of Washington letterhead. The headlines in Italy incorrectly interpreted this as “American Judge Wants Trial Transferred to America,” which infuriated Knox’s local counsel. By the time Heavey retracted his letter a few months later, with an apology to the Italian Justice department, the damage had been done. The Perugia judge who denied Amanda’s request for house arrest said that one of the reasons was flight risk and that “the American judge who would have to sign her extradition back to Italy” would not cooperate. Knox’s attorney, Luciano Ghirga, told reporters outside the courthouse in Perugia, “The American lawyers do not represent anyone here.”
    Meanwhile, the blogosphere began to crackle with acrimonious exchanges between those who believed that Amanda was innocent and those who did not. The first blog dedicated to the crime, Perugia Shock, was set up on November 2, 2007, the day Meredith’s body
was discovered. The blogger, Frank Sfarzo, a skeletal man with a waxed crew cut, ran a student flophouse in town and believes that he missed a call from Meredith while she was looking for lodging. When I later asked him in an e-mail why he started the blog, he explained the missed connection and described how Meredith had looked at the coroner’s: “Seriously, she was so beautiful and sweet, she seemed to be alive, with her eyes open, with the mascara on her eylashes [sic], just like ready to go out.”
    Sfarzo hid behind the handle “Frank the blogger,” and he would never confirm whether he actually saw Meredith on the autopsy table or simply saw the coroner’s photos. He ingratiated himself with several clerks and cops around town and, curiously, often had a document no one else could get or a scoop that beat out the rest of the press. He started out as an objective observer, slightly sympathetic to Meredith, but became a rabid proponent of Amanda’s innocence. He was the quintessential blogger—a smart, cryptic insomniac. Even the chief prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, read his posts.
     
     
    MIGNINI ALWAYS BELIEVED that Frank’s blog was intellectually inspired and financially subsidized by Mario
Spezi, the Italian journalist who covered the Monster of Florence serial killer for La Nazione. During the 1970s and 1980s, several couples were murdered as they made love in their cars in the foothills around Florence. Spezi followed the investigation for years and pinned his reputation on a theory of the case that Mignini disputed. Eventually, Mignini had Spezi jailed for obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence.
    Enter best-selling author Douglas Preston, who went to Florence in 1999 to follow a dream and write a thriller based in the fifteenth century and centered on a lost painting by Masaccio. He stumbled into the Monster of Florence case when he discovered that one of the murders had occurred near the villa he had rented for the summer. He soon met Spezi, and the two forged an intense friendship and working relationship that produced the best-selling book Monster of Florence. That nonfiction book makes Spezi’s case that the Monster was part of a conspiracy that started in Sardinia. Mignini maintains that the killer was Francesco Narducci, a local doctor with strange sexual tendencies. Because Narducci’s body was found floating in Lake Trasimeno near Perugia in 1985, the investigation into his death was under