Here is more info on the real killer, Rudy Guede - it is rather amazing!
The earlier conviction in a separate fast-track trial of Guede, an immigrant from Ivory Coast, is also likely to be examined in the Knox-Sollecito appeal. He gave the only eye-witness account of seeing the two lovers at the murder scene as it took place.
After the murder, Guede fled to Germany, where he was arrested two weeks later after being caught travelling on a train without a ticket.
Disturbingly, police failed to act against Guede, despite having clear evidence of him committing break-ins or burglaries – some of them armed with a knife – at least three times in the weeks leading to Meredith’s murder.
On September 27, 2007 – five weeks before the killing – Perugia bar tender Cristian Tramantano heard a noise downstairs in his home and found Guede wandering around with a large knife.
Tramantano recognised Guede from his work in a nightclub. There was a confrontation between the two, ending when Guede ran away.
On four occasions, Tramantano went to Perugia’s central police station to report the break-in, identify Guede as the culprit and to detail how the intruder was armed and threatened him. On each occasion, he was ignored and police refused to log his complaint.
The following weekend, there was a break-in at an English-speaking nursery school in Milan in which
€2,000 and a digital camera were stolen. The school owner, Maria Antoinette Salvadori del Prato, reported it to her local police station.
Three weeks later, on Saturday, October 27 – one week before the murder – Mrs Prato arrived at the school early in the morning with a locksmith to replace the front door, only to be confronted by Guede standing in the main school entrance.
Police were called and Guede questioned. A stolen laptop, digital camera and a ten-inch kitchen knife were found in his backpack.
But instead of being arrested and charged, Guede was merely escorted to Milan central railway station and placed on a train back to Perugia.
In the interim, on the weekend of October 13, there had been a break-in at the office of lawyers Paolo Brocchi and Luigi Palazzoli in which a first-floor window was smashed – similar to the break-in at Meredith’s house.
A computer and other items were stolen. They were later found in Guede’s possession but he was neither arrested nor charged.
This series of crimes and the absence of police action has led several of Knox’s defence team to believe that Guede was very likely a police informant being protected by someone within the force. If, as one associate of the defence team says, that is the case then it must be investigated, as that failure to act left Guede free to murder Meredith.
Knox’s accusation that Perugia bar owner Patrick Lumumba was the killer and her confession to being in the house at the time will also be examined.
It is now known that Knox was interrogated for nearly 53 hours over five days, part of the time without a lawyer present. Italian law is clear: a suspect must not be interrogated without a lawyer.
However, Knox’s interrogation fell into an uncertain area of the law because she went voluntarily to the police station and was initially interviewed as a potential witness, not a suspect.
At some point, she blamed Lumumba for the murder, adding that she had been present. At that time, Knox became a suspect and the interrogation should have been stopped. She should have been told of her rights and provided with a lawyer.
But nobody knows exactly when this happened because there is no video or audio recording of the entire interrogation – in spite of Italian legislation’s insistence upon the videotaping of any suspect’s interrogation.
According to her defence team, Knox was ‘brainwashed...pressured into making up a story to satisfy very demanding interrogators’.
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