Inside the Amanda Knox murder investigation

Twenty-year-old Amanda Marie Knox seemed to be another cute American girl on an adventure in Italy, far from her old Jesuit high school and suburban home in Seattle. Since November 6, 2007, the European media has worked overtime to help transform Knox's gamine gaze into the cold mask of a brash killer. Knox, along with her 24-year-old Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and Congolese bar owner Lumumba "Patrick" Diya, whom police reports list as 44, has been held in police custody for her possible involvement in a horrific sex crime. The alleged victim of that crime was Knox's roommate, a dark-haired Briton named Meredith Kercher.

The young women lived with two Italian roommates in a house on the Viale Sant'Antonio in Perugia, Italy, close to the center of the city. Kercher, 21, was in the third year of her four-year European studies course at Leeds University in Northern England. Her study in Perugia was under the auspices of the EU's Erasmus Exchange Program. On the first day of November, Meredith hung out with some friends who lived nearby. They watched The Notebook, then Meredith said goodnight and headed back to her place. Later, her friends could not recall anything remarkable about that evening.

Amanda Knox claimed to have discovered Meredith's half-nude, dead body the following morning, but the police were not alerted until they came to the residence to return Meredith's cell phone, which had been found in the garden of an elderly neighbor. Meredith lay in a congealed pool of blood in her bed, covered with a duvet, her throat slashed. Her death had been horribly slow. She bled out over a period of several hours.

Knox, Sollecito, and Lumumba were arrested four days later. Early autopsy results found no sign of rape, but they were suspected of having committed both a sexual assault and a homicide. Italian authorities believe that Meredith Kercher was murdered when she resisted joining in a "violent orgy" with the trio. Evidence found in her bedroom led them to believe that Meredith fought her attackers.

Evidence from Meredith's body allegedly indicates Knox's participation. Police think that Knox held the other woman down with enough force to leave prints on Meredith's skin. One of the two men may have cut Meredith's throat.

The salacious details of the murder—and Amanda Knox's arrest in particular—galvanized news outlets all across the European Union, but the British tabloids and Italian papers really went at the story with hammer and tongs. With her looks and a tabloid-ready MySpace screen name, "Foxy Knoxy," Knox was tailor-made for weeks of front-page coverage, every strange twist and turn in the case parsed in exhaustive detail.