Angel Face by Barbie Latza Nadeau Page B

on trial for wiretapping journalists as a veiled threat to anyone who might try to cultivate the prosecutor as a source. His conviction, however, posed a new dilemma: How could Knox’s supporters argue that the Italian justice system was hopelessly corrupt when it appeared to work just fine against Mignini?
    Mignini is not the evil figure described by Preston. Nor is he the deeply religious, humble truth seeker he claims to be. He is somewhere in the middle. He is not prone to mistakes and wild theories, as Preston contends. But he is not beyond them, either. Among other things, he is quick to suspect Satanism in some of the more grisly crimes he investigates. In the early days of his involvement in the Monster of Florence case, Mignini called in a Roman sorceress named Gabriella Carlizzi to advise him personally on Satanic signs and symbols. But he subsequently fell out with Carlizzi, a familiar figure around Rome and Perugia who channels her dead priest, and even had her arrested on a number of occasions. When Mignini first heard of the ghoulish paraphernalia in the house on via della
Pergola, he was not thinking about Halloween, but instead thought he had stumbled on another Satanic rite. But that theory never made it past the preliminary hearings, though Mignini tried to reintroduce it in the closing arguments.
    At the same time that the Knox family was painting Mignini as a vindictive lunatic, it was flooding the Web with pictures of “honor student” Amanda playing soccer and holding babies. Unfortunately, those images were undermined by Amanda’s behavior in Capanne prison outside Perugia. In the weeks after her arrest, she wrote a diary that would provide even more fodder for the hungry press. Certain favorable pages of the diary were leaked by Amanda’s defense lawyers, but that simply tipped reporters to its existence, and the entire thing was part of the official 10,000-page case dossier—the holy grail that every journalist wanted on his or her hard drive. Documents became the trading currency in covering the Knox case, and they were used as bargaining chips by the prosecutor, lawyers, and journalists.
     
     
    WITHOUT QUESTION, Amanda’s prison writings—illustrated by stick figures with smiley faces, castles, and
evergreen trees—were disturbing. She obsessed about the murder, writing about what Meredith’s final moments must have been like and searching her foggy memory:
    I lay quietly on my bed, thinking, crying, sleeping. I wasn’t hungry and when they told me to eat I got a stomach ache. And the worst part was, I still couldn’t remember exactly what I had been doing at my boyfriend’s apartment. This was my great mystery that I had to answer, and I couldn’t. And I knew if I couldn’t remember this it would be reason enough for the police to think to accuse me, which I learned later was exactly what they were doing.
    At times, Amanda seemed to revel in her new notoriety and at one point even wrote about her fan mail:
    I received 23 fan letters today that I think the guards have been saving up for me from at least the past couple of days. That makes the count up to 35 letters. Oh yeah, and I got a postcard from the post office saying I have a package too. Fun . . .
    As for the letters themselves, they vary, and are all from guys ranging from 20-35 on average . . . Some ask
me to have faith in God. Others bash the Italian justice system. The majority comment on how beautiful I am. I’ve received blatant love letters from people who love me from first sight, a marriage proposal, and others wanting to get to know “the girl with the angel face” . . . I think the same thing about this as I did before. If I were ugly, would they be writing me wishing me encouragement? I don’t think so.
    She was less certain about where she stood with Raf:
    Something interesting that has come up is about Raffaele. Apparently he told newspapers (though who can trust them) that all I’ve done is made his life