By Calvin Palmer
Amanda Knox is innocent, so says former FBI agent Steve Moore based on his years of experience with the bureau.
Moore argues that when someone’s throat is cut, as was the case with British student Meredith Kercher, blood spurts into the air. Kercher would have lost more than four pints of blood. The killer, or killers, would have been covered in her blood and their footprints would have left bloody trails of guilt.
“You cannot just scrub it off,” said Moore. “Blood is God’s way of identifying the man with the knife.”
Moore feels a great injustice has been committed and is trying to whip up counterparts in Italy to do the work to prove his theory is correct and Knox is innocent.
Knox and her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted last December for the murder of Meredith in the house in Perugia, Italy, she shared with Knox.
Meredith’s room was found to be full of full of the finger and footprints of Rudy Guede, a drifter, burglar and small-time drug dealer originally from the Ivory Coast. But there was not a single bloody footprint belonging to Knox or Sollecito.
Moore asserts it is “absolutely impossible” they could have been in the room when Meredith died.
“There are no footprints of theirs in the blood,” he said. “To believe the prosecution case, they would have had to have been floating on a magic carpet.”
Moore claims the lack of clarity in their mutual alibi is not the real issue. The onus is on the prosecution to justify its claims.
In a crime scene, Moore says, “the absence of evidence is evidence of absence” of the key suspects, and the prosecutors did not come close to putting Amanda and Raffaele in the room where Meredith died.
Moore is also scathing about the prosecutors’ “read” on the crime scene, which is contradicted by all the forensic evidence, as if a “group of libidinous adolescent boys had tried to imagine the most lascivious thing that they believed could have happened”.
Knox does not satisfy any of the criteria that might suggest she would harm, never mind kill, Meredith, according to Moore. “In the FBI, we took the view that the simplest explanation of a crime is almost always the best explanation,” he said.
He believes not only does Amanda not fit the psychological profile of a killer in any respect, but she also doesn’t fit the profile of a person capable of violence.
Guede, whose guilt is not in doubt, has already had his sentence cut in half, and it could be cut again, setting him free within a year or two. Knox’s supporters believe a deal has been struck.
Moore is quick to point out that he is not writing a book, not being paid as a consultant by the Knox camp in Seattle. Indeed, his mission to expose the faults in the trial has cost him his job with Pepperdine University. He was fired last month for refusing to drop his campaign.
Pepperdine University has an affiliated campus in Italy and Moore’s campaigning on behalf of Knox was causing political problems there.
So there you have it. The Italian prosecutors got it all wrong. The jury was hoodwinked into delivering the wrong verdict as part of a witch hunt, according to Moore.
It all sounds very plausible, just like the theories that the attacks of 9/11 were orchestrated by the CIA. But they are just that theories and devoid of hard evidence and facts.
Is Moore privy to every police report in the Kercher case? No.
Was Moore present at the crime scene shortly after the murder was committed? No
How likely is it that Moore has personal contacts with the police force in Perugia? Unlikely.
Why is Moore the only former member of the FBI to reach these startling conclusions? My guess is personal vanity and ego.
How good an agent was Moore during his time with the FBI? No one knows of his record. It could be that he was an absolute dullard but made good coffee for the rest of the team. He is on record as saying that he quit the FBI because he was tired of foreign travel. Or could it be that he quit because he was still a field agent after 25 years with bureau and had been passed over for promotion on several occasions? We just don’t know but are expected to believe that he is right where everyone else is wrong.
Why haven’t we heard from other law enforcement officers expressing the same opinions as Moore, if they are so self evident regarding Knox’s innocence? Over to you, Inspector Knacker of Scotland Yard.
We only have Moore’s version of why he was fired by Pepperdine University. What is the university’s side of the story? Could it be that Moore was falling down on the job he was employed to do?
His quote, “Blood is God’s way of identifying the man with the knife,” brings into question his credibility both regarding his theory and his abilities as an FBI agent. Perhaps God revealed Knox’s innocence to Moore in a dream. So that explains why the FBI has such a success rate in solving all of its cases.
What we have here is a man in the throes of a mid-life crisis, no longer in a job of any importance and unable to come to terms with his reduced status? What better way to get back into the spotlight, and massage his ego, than to take up this cause célèbre.
Knox is due to appeal against her conviction for murder next month, which probably explains Moore’s timely intervention.
Stefano Maffei, a University of Parma professor of criminal procedure, says the appeal court is likely to agree with the murder conviction but find that mitigating factors outweigh the aggravated ones, which leads to a one-third reduction in sentence.
According to Maffei, 18 Italian magistrates have reviewed the evidence in the Knox case and come to the same conclusion of culpability, which somehow ingrains the decision into the judiciary.
But in the light of Knox’s good behavior, and other sociological reasons, her sentence is likely to be reduced, he said.
The prosecution is also appealing that Knox’s sentence be increased from 26 years to life.
[Based on reports by the London Evening Standard, The Daily Telegraph and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.]