Father’s fight for truth about his murdered daughter... and a grief that will never end

IT’S a story of a sparkling girl who was born tiny but grew to have a large presence in the lives of those who knew and loved her. Meredith adored singing and dancing and lit up a room. She was a young woman who radiated warmth and had many admirers of both sexes. She loved a party but took her work seriously; she often arrived late, but was a reliable and loving friend. She’d experienced young love – and even a proposal she’d gently turned down.

Then the 21-year-old was killed, ravaged by a knife wound to the throat and with 47 other wounds and bruises. Her body was found under a duvet in the innocent-looking white cottage she shared with other students on a hillside in the picturesque medieval Italian town of Perugia, in early November 2007.

Her family – amicably divorced parents John and Arline, older sister Stephanie and brothers John and Lyle – were so happy that Meredith, an Italian and European Politics student at Leeds University, was enjoying her year abroad in Italy. She’d found great friends, loved her studies and was making great progress with her spoken Italian, she told them during her regular calls home to Coulsdon, Surrey. She sounded effervescent, settled and full of plans for the coming months.

Then Arline heard on the TV news that a British student had been found dead in Perugia, and a terrible pall of dread fell over the family. Soon afterwards their terrible fears were translated into horror, when it was confirmed that the dead girl was their beloved Meredith.

Last autumn, two years after they were convicted of her murder and sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively, American Amanda Knox (the British girl’s flatmate in Perugia at the time of the murder) and Knox’s Italian boyfriend Raffaelle Sollecito were acquitted of the killing. As they left the Italian jail, flashbulbs, TV deals and publishing contracts were waved in their faces. With the convictions of two of the three convicted killers quashed, the Kercher family were left flattened.

If Knox and Sollecito were out of the equation, where was the explanation of Meredith’s death? “The truth has evaporated,” says John Kercher.

The murder conviction of Rudy Guede, a drifter from Ivory Coast who admitted being at the scene on the night of the murder, still stands. He was sentenced to 16 years after a fast-track trial. Knox and Sollecito’s convictions were overturned by a jury on grounds of unreliable forensic evidence and lack of motive, with a great deal of discussion turning on disputed DNA samples found on Meredith’s bra strap and a kitchen knife from Sollecito’s kitchen. With the quashed convictions, around 100,000 pages of evidence from the original trial were thrown out – unless yet another set of judges currently examining the legal probity of the successful appeals decides that a retrial is in order.

John Kercher says he would not want innocent people convicted but he still believes that Guede could not have acted alone, such was the nature of his daughter’s injuries. Nor was a break-in at the cottage by “persons unknown” adequately supported by the evidence, in his opinion. In the original trial it was contended by the prosecution that the culprits had staged a ‘break-in’ scene to cover their tracks.

Since Meredith’s death, the Kercher family have had support from many friends and a host of strangers around the world. People who never knew the beautiful girl whose life was ruthlessly ended have asked John Kercher, a freelance journalist, to write about that brief life and how his family withstood the emotional battering meted out to them not only by the shocking loss but of four years waiting for the labyrinthine procedures of the Italian legal system to do their work. Reading Meredith - Our Daughter’s Murder, And The Heartbreaking Quest For The Truth is painful in many places – producing the urge to skim quickly through the pages of most vividly expressed horror and heartbreak. When Arline, John and Stephanie first travelled to Perugia to identify Meredith’s body at the last moment her father could not step into the morgue and have so many happy memories displaced by such a tragic image.

“I couldn’t go in. I had been so numb on the journey here that the brutal reality of having to see what had been done to my beautiful daughter had not really hit home...I stood there, motionless, trying to explain that I did not want to go in. For me it would have put a full stop to my memory of Meredith...When her mother emerged from having seen her she said Meredith looked beautiful and peaceful. Arline even smiled once, as though all of the happy moments in Meredith’s life were passing through her mind.” After six weeks, the Kerchers were allowed to bring Meredith home for a funeral and burial in Surrey.

The family could not afford, nor did they want, to be in Perugia throughout the many months of investigation and the long trial that convicted Knox and Sollecito. They travelled to Italy for key moments, but staying at home and attempting to go about their ordinary lives was no easy option. They watched events unfold, reading news reports and translated transcriptions of court legal proceedings, hearing at a distance the baffling changes of alibi offered by Knox and Sollecito.

It appeared that the only true motivation Knox might have had for killing Meredith was jealousy of the British girl’s looks and popularity. She and Meredith had not been getting on well, Meredith had told her family. But still, to an agonised parent looking for answers, this surely hardly constituted real cause for murder.

The idea of being able to sit impassively in court, as the family did, while the jury heard graphic details of the terrible blows and wounds inflicted on Meredith’s body is impossible to imagine.

But two years of waiting for justice for her had taught them to rein in their emotions when necessary. After a moment of confusion, when it wasn’t clear whether the verdict was guilty or not guilty, the truth dawned and Knox and Sollecito were led from court. The family had to face a pandemonium of flashbulbs and were expected to express some sort of relief and “closure”. But they knew the pair were entitled to appeal – and their lawyers did that right away.

John Kercher says he has learned so much more about his darling daughter from her friends and teachers while researching the book, and he draws some comfort from their loving words. In the meantime Meredith’s case still isn’t over. Five judges are considering whether the law was followed correctly during the appeal process, and their report is due this autumn. It could uphold the acquittal, finally drawing a line under the case; it could reinstate the convictions, which would then cause a long extradition battle for Amanda Knox; or order a retrial.

While they wait for the next chapter in this heartbreaking story to reveal itself somehow life has to go on for the Kerchner family, knowing the questions that seethe inside their head may never be answered. Even if the plot is eventually explained, the grief will remain unaltered.

(Any proceeds from the book will go into a foundation set up in Meredith’s name and may be used to support other bereaved relatives facing legal procedures overseas.)

Meredith – Our Daughter’s Murder And The Heartbreaking Quest for The Truth by John Kercher, is published by Hodder and Stoughton, £16.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk Postage costs £2.85.

As she was in life, in death Meredith will forever be a part of our lives...

“FOR me and my family, no matter how many court cases follow, no matter how many hearings, no matter how many speeches and investigations, this can never be over. As she was in life, in death Meredith will forever be a part of our lives...

“As the trial and appeals stretched out over four years, Meredith, for some reason that evades us, seemed to have become almost forgotten. Why this could ever have happened I still do not understand, for she was the victim of this terrible crime and the centrepiece of everything that happened on that November night and in the years that followed. I often look at photographs of Meredith, especially those I have recently rediscovered: of her standing there, in her pink ballet outfit; of her performing in school concerts; of the holidays that we enjoyed together; of her excited face on Christmas morning, opening her presents - such happy family moments. It is not easy to remember all of this. I still expect that there is going to be a knock on the door, and that I am going to open it and she is going to be standing there...

“My family and I now find ourselves in a limbo that might never end – wondering exactly what happened in those last moments of Meredith’s life and how convictions that seemed to offer all the terrible answers two years ago have now been so emphatically overturned. There are so many people in the world who would have benefited had Meredith been allowed to live, and now they never will.”