Amanda Knox may not have spent the whole night with then-boyfriend Rafaelle Sollecito –as she has always claimed– on the night Meredith Kercher was murdered. That’s the latest version of events as told by Sollecito, who said at a press conference in Rome Tuesday that he is now “not sure” he and Knox were together the entire evening of October 31, 2007 in Perugia, Italy.
The now-26-year-old Knox, who is still free in the United States though she stands convicted in an Italian court of killing Kercher, has long claimed that she and Sollecito spent the entire evening together watching TV and having sex. Until recently, the former engineering student has backed up her story.
But Sollecito was also convicted in the Kercher slaying and faces 25 years in prison if the verdict is upheld on appeal. In February, he began distancing himself from the Amanda Knox alibi, calling her behavior after discovering Kercher’s bloodied body “peculiar” and questioning why Knox took a shower rather than immediately calling the police after finding Kercher dead on the floor of the small cottage the two students shared.
On Tuesday, Sollecito — who met Amanda Knox just one week before the Kercher killing — went further, saying the timing of a text message sent by Knox to the owner of a bar where she worked made him doubt whether he and Knox were together that whole night, and adding for the first time that he believes Knox’s story contains “anomalies.”
“I was in love with her and we had some very happy moments, but ultimately Amanda was a stranger,” Sollecito said Tuesday. “There are anomalies in her version of events. Against me there is nothing.”
The cases against both Knox and Sollecito are now headed to Italy’s highest court, and if the guilty verdicts are upheld there, the pair will be sent to prison — though Knox will need to be extradited from the United States first.
The new doubts raised by Sollecito are apparently part of his legal team’s strategy to separate his case from Knox’s before the high court.
“They are not Siamese twins — one body with two heads,” said Sollecito’s lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno.
Sollecito’s new lack of certainty about that night almost seven years ago stems from a text message sent at 8:35 pm, about an hour before Kercher was killed. Knox maintains that she sent the text from inside Sollecito’s apartment, but according to evidence presented during the pair’s sentencing in January, cell phone records proved she was somewhere on the street when Knox sent the text.
“Either the court has made their umpteenth mistake or she lied to me,” Sollecito said of his then-girlfriend Amanda Knox. “I have always believed in the innocence of Amanda. But I have to react to the accusations of the court and to the text message.”