The Fatal Gift of Beauty

Starred review from July 4, 2011
The 2007 murder of 22-year-old British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, captured the world's attention because of the woman eventually convicted of killing her: 20-year-old Seattle native and fellow student Amanda Knox. Burleigh (Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt) examines the intertwined lives of the students and the media circus surrounding the trial in this powerful example of narrative nonfiction. In July 2007, Knox moved into a house shared with Kercher and two older Italian women. On November 2, Kercher was found with her throat slit in her bedroom, and Knox and Raffaele Sollecitoâwhom she'd started seeing only a few days earlierâwere first on the scene. Giuliano Mignini, the notoriously tough Perugian prosecutor, charged them with murder, adding their acquaintance Rudy Guede when evidence placed him at the crime scene. The protracted trial was awash with what Burleigh describes as faulty forensic evidence and testimony that was more rumor than substantiated fact, but Knox was convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison; she is appealing her conviction. Burleigh, who parses how the Knox trial was perhaps tainted, still presents a fair and unbiased portrait of a girl adrift in a foreign legal system and a culture rife with preconceptions about young American women, 15 b&w photos; 2 maps.

March 1, 2011

On November 1, 2007, Meredith Kercher, a British student at the University of Perugia, was found sexually assaulted and murdered in an apartment she shared with American student Amanda Knox and two other women. Knox, along with boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, was eventually convicted of helping a local named Rudy Guede murder Kercher when she resisted his advances. Amid a firestorm of media coverage, allegations were made that the investigation was botched; counterallegations said that portrayals of Knox as a victim were unwarranted. Here, journalist/author Burleigh (e.g., Unholy Business) reconstructs a murder case that has proved to be about much more than murder. There will be interest.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2011
The murder of college student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, on November 1, 2007, is, according to journalist Burleigh, what the Italian press call a cronaca nera, a black chronicle, a story that touches on the diabolical. Burleigh, who attended trial hearings and then the trial itself, which resulted in the conviction of college student Amanda Knox for murder, brings a great depth of knowledge about Italian judicial proceedings and culture to her account of this celebrated case. Her presence in the courtroom yields telling minutiae, including the fact that Knox showed up in court most days wearing a hoodie, suggesting that neither she nor her parents thought the charge could stick. Burleigh overplays the role of Italian culture and its fascination with beauty as a way of explaining both the interest in the trial and its outcome (Knox seems to be pleasant looking but is in no way an outstanding beauty). Still, Burleigh delivers a compelling, up-close look at the trial and makes a convincing case for Knox's innocence in the face of a rush to judgment on the part of the Italian judiciary and media. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Savvy true-crime reporting combined with a headline-hogging murder trial and plenty of off-the-book-page coverage will return the Amanda Knox case to the limelight.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

July 15, 2011

Powerful assessment of a tragic crime and its disastrous aftermath.

The 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher in the university town of Perugia, Italy, at first seemed scandalously comprehensible: The victim's amoral American housemate, Amanda Knox, bewitched two Italian men into a "sex game" gone bad. Journalist and Elle contributing editor Burleigh (Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land, 2008, etc.) argues that Knox and her equally naive boyfriend became unwitting scapegoats to a fumbled investigation and a volatile mix of Italian gender issues and local mores (she adeptly portrays Perugia as a gritty, conservative region with a tangled history). Although authorities quickly convicted Rudy Guede, a troubled local, they then successfully prosecuted Knox despite a near-total lack of credible evidence, other than her strange outbursts and writings. "The scenario presented by the prosecution was not very plausible," writes the author. "The two students did not behave like guilty people...[but] were guilty of callous, blithe, and stupid behavior." It was this that damned them from the Italian perspective, but Burleigh establishes that Knox's adolescent self-indulgence was both typically American and reactive to a seamy European hedonism that is both moralistically condemned and economically tolerated. The author writes in a colorful, amped-up style that's also thoughtful and detail-oriented, capturing how this cross-cultural milieu spawned a murder case in which all involved—the Italian authorities, the feckless youngsters, the media—look awful. Burleigh establishes much background information, allowing her to plausibly indict a "labyrinthine judicial bureaucracy lacking any official public face or any rules of transparency." She notes that in Italy, the police often sue defendants for slander, and "defense witnesses...are not sworn in, and they are presumed to be lying." Ultimately, she argues, Knox simply made a more fascinating villain than Guede, despite his burglaries and damning forensic evidence. Her devastating conclusion shows how actual physical evidence supports Knox's alibi and suggests that the disturbed Guede acted alone.

Burleigh's propulsive narrative and the many unsettling aspects of the case make this a standout among recent true-crime titles.

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