The Trials of Amanda Knox, More4

Perception was everything last night in Garfield Kennedy’s fascinating if, at times, frustrating documentary, The Trials of Amanda Knox. Was the American student who was convicted last month of murdering her British flatmate in Perugia, Meredith Kercher, a scheming hussy into (very) extreme sex games, or just an averagely adventurous twentysomething turned into a scapegoat by an Italian judiciary that had already convinced itself of her guilt? Kennedy’s film considered the evidence, and it also detailed the concomitant trial by the media - and there, to a degree, is a problem. Because this documentary is also “the media”, and Knox’s case (appeal pending) is not closed. Somewhat misleadingly, it could be argued, the film was screening in More4’s True Stories slot. But was this only the partial truth, with some added special pleading?

If the documentary itself was on trial, the prosecution could build its case around the heavy involvement of the Knox family. Kennedy visited Seattle, meeting Knox’s mother, father, stepfather, sister, friends and ex-boyfriends, none of whom had a bad word to say about a girl who apparently earned the epithet “Foxy” because of her crouching style of playing soccer. It was, of course, the “Foxy Knoxy” tag on her MySpace page that would provide such a gift to the media – and so well described her naturally sly-seeming smile.

The most ambiguous remark was made by her mother, Edda, saying that there were “no shades of grey in Amanda’s life” – an utterance that wasn’t, however, pursued. Realising that Amanda’s image was dominating the long, protracted trial in Italy, the Knox family mortgaged the house, hired a PR firm and began fundraising dinners for “The Friends of Amanda”. Now you can’t blame the filmmakers for wanting the full access to the Knox family - it was one hell of a scoop - but the suspicion remained: who was using who?

The defence would argue that the film also included an extensive interview with the chief prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Mignini, although the prosecution could counter that it was a mite mischievous to include a sequence where Mignini answered he interviewer’s questions while apparently reading a text on his mobile phone.

This was a man who believed himself slandered by a US newspaper article that described him as “mentally unstable”, but Mignini came across as anything but unstable. Indeed he seemed balanced and nobody’s fool - understanding the agonies of the Knox family while asking just how well any of us really know our loved ones. In one wonderfully grave pronouncement, worthy of Inspector Maigret himself, he stated, “The human soul... it is a mystery.”

The media think they know the make-up of Amanda Knox’s soul, and newspapers and magazines have been full of the allegedly lurid sex life of “Foxy Knoxy” - indeed the working title of Kennedy’s film was Making a Killing, which accurately describes the giant payday created by the media maelstrom over the case. So there’s Amanda competing for male attention ever since her mother left her father for a younger man, or having sex with strangers on a train, and so on. None of this was in the documentary, but can be gleaned from the most cursory Google search.

Indeed, a remarkable aspect of the case has been the so-called “trial by blog”, as cyberspace has filled with predominantly ill-informed comment about the murder and about Knox herself. What was interesting was how many more bloggers than conventional journalists featured in last night’s film.

For their turn, the Knox family accused the Italian judiciary of leaking particularly damaging nuggets of titillating information, including extracts from her prison diary in which Knox, mistakenly believing herself to be HIV-positive, detailed the men she had slept with – seven in total – since arriving in Italy just six weeks previously.

But what of the evidence itself? I didn’t follow the case at all closely as it unfolded, but purely from the evidence of last night’s documentary I would say it was probably Rudy Guede who actually wielded the knife that entered Meredith Kercher’s throat before her windpipe was shattered. Depending on who you listened to, Guede was either a “classic Italian girl-botherer” or “a quiet, normal guy”. The fact remained that only a week earlier he had broken into a nursery in Rome and stolen a knife, while his creepy internet post of himself as a vampire wasn’t exactly a good character reference. More crucially, Guede’s DNA was found inside Meredith Kercher’s body and his hand-prints in her blood.

But what of Amanda Knox’s involvement? This is where it all got rather muddy. With a good deal of generosity you could just about overlook the circumstantial evidence of Knox and her boyfriend of two weeks (and, it has been decided, fellow murderer), Raffaele Sollecito, shopping for lingerie the day after Kercher’s gruesome murder. Or of Knox apparently giggling and doing cartwheels in the immediate aftermath - after all, it’s not a crime to be callous. And the forensic evidence against Knox seemed particularly feeble, whereas it was overwhelming against Guede.

But what seemed damning was Knox accusing Patrick Lumumba, the entirely innocent manager at the bar where Knox worked. As Lumumba ruefully conceded in last night’s documentary, the reason Knox probably implicated him was because he was black – and Knox knew that the Italian police would readily accept the plausibility of a black man being the culprit. Knox’s courtroom explanation for falsely accusing Lumumba seemed incoherent and unconvincing, and if Knox had stitched him up, who was she protecting? You couldn’t help feeling that she was protecting herself.

Probably only four people know exactly what happened that November night in Perugia, and one of them is dead. Kennedy's film was bookended with the press conference given by the Kercher family after Knox’s conviction, a seemly reminder of the principal victim in this case. But the last word went to Knox’s father, Curt, extending his sympathy to the Kerchers while also pleading for her murder not to create a fresh victim: his daughter. That kind of nailed the whole drift of the documentary, which was to introduce an element of reasonable doubt. I can only begin to imagine what the Kerchers think about that, but, in the interests of justice, it can’t be a bad thing.