Nearly two decades have passed since Amanda Knox, a young US exchange student studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, returned to her villa to find her housemate Meredith Kercher brutally murdered.
And while the world has mostly moved on – namely, the internet sleuths who have all found new true-crime cases to sink their teeth into – the murder’s reluctant poster girl is still trying to make sense of it.
“When I came home from prison, I had this idea that I would get to have my life back. But I just didn’t,” shares Amanda. She was jailed for four years after being convicted of the killing, alongside her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. A judge later acquitted them in 2015.
“It utterly changed my life. I was in a really bad place for a long time. Even though I wasn’t technically in prison any more, I was certainly in a prison of this trauma and the world’s making.”
Then 20 and now 37, Amanda notes the cruel irony that while the actual convicted killer, Rudy Guede, who was quietly released from prison in 2021, is now free to live an anonymous life, her “identity is inextricably linked” with Meredith’s death.
“No one remembers what he looks like. Yet, I regularly get messages from people saying, ‘Do you know who will never get to do whatever you’re doing? Meredith.’
“It’s almost like it’s an offensive thing that I’m even alive. People always see it as an offence to the memory of Meredith.”
Despite the permanent mark the crime has left, Amanda has been working hard to rewrite her narrative. The ordeal had prescribed it to her for almost the entirety of her twenties.
She hosts her own podcast, Labyrinths, works as an advocate for criminal justice reform and, perhaps most proudly, is now a mother to two children – daughter Eureka, three, and son Echo, one – with husband Christopher Robinson.
“I do genuinely feel free now. I feel like I finally have roots planted,” she tells Woman’s Day of her new life in Seattle.
“But I still do find myself grieving those two girls who both went travelling and yet only one came back. That never goes away and probably never will.”
She adds that the weight of that grief meant she has already had to have some difficult discussions at home.
“Eureka will sometimes ask me to tell her the story of when Mummy went to Italy. I’ll tell her that when Mummy was younger, Mummy went to Italy and someone hurt her friend. The police thought that Mummy had hurt her friend, so they put Mummy in jail. I was very sad for a long time.
“Then she’ll then ask, ‘Is Mummy OK now?’ and I’ll say, ‘Yes, Mummy’s very happy now.’”
Amanda adds that she always wants to be transparent with her daughter, no matter how difficult the subject matter is.
“I’ll always be an open book for her and this is my way of showing, not telling, my daughter some of the lessons I’ve learned… and how even when bad things happen to you, there’s a way not to just rise above it, but to rise with it.”
Amanda says it was her desire not to impart any trauma onto her children that made her want to close that chapter of her life for good and return to Italy for the first time since she was acquitted in 2015.
During her journey in 2023, which she covers in her new memoir Free: My Search For Meaning, Amanda revisits the villa where she lived with Meredith and reunites with her ex-boyfriend Raffaele, the pair honouring a date they never got to go on due to their arrests.
But it’s a meeting that happens at the climax of the book that proves most profound and healing for Amanda. It was a face-to-face with the prosecutor who put her behind bars, Giuliano Mignini.
She recalls, “My husband kept asking me, ‘What are you trying to get out of this?’ and after a certain point, I realised maybe it’s not about getting anything from him. Maybe I have something inside of myself to give him.
“As soon as that clicked, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m f**king unstoppable.’ Like, I have something to give and that totally reframed it all for me.”
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