00:00:54.480And while you're at it, check out Footy Prime Daily.
00:00:57.180Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at New East.
00:01:08.880Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's Sunday double feature.
00:01:14.120Today, a look back in the archives and two fascinating conversations with people who had
00:01:18.260moments in the spotlight when tragic crimes changed their lives forever. First up, Amanda
00:01:24.480Knox. She came on in November 2021 to talk through her entire story in a revealing interview that
00:01:31.600went through every detail. A lot of people still think that she was the one responsible for her
00:01:37.580roommate, Meredith Kircher's death. You'll hear this interview and you'll be able to make up your
00:01:42.560own mind. You'll hear what I think too. And then John Ramsey, JonBenet's father, who came on in
00:01:48.280December 2022 to go through the horrors of that day in 1996 and some last hopeful updates
00:01:57.780in what has clearly become a cold case. Enjoy, and we'll see you Monday.
00:02:03.520Joining me now is Amanda Knox. She's a writer, a new mother, and co-host of the podcast
00:02:09.420Labyrinths with her husband, Christopher Robinson. Amanda is a household name,
00:02:15.520not just in our country, but worldwide, but not by choice. She has spent the past six years trying0.54
00:02:21.600to reclaim her life, her story, and her freedom after she was wrongfully convicted of a murder
00:02:28.120she did not commit in Italy in 2009. And she joins me now. Amanda, thank you for being back
00:02:34.620with me. We interviewed when I was on NBC, and I'm so happy to see you doing so well,
00:02:39.540and congratulations on the birth of your daughter. Thank you so much, Megan. It's great to reconnect.
00:02:44.760So I've been like neck deep in Amanda Knox in preparation for this interview. And of course, I was in the media when this happened to you. So I covered it, not in the way the British tabloids did, but I covered it as a, you know, news story.
00:02:58.820And as a young woman myself, I was skeptical of the claims being made about you.
00:03:04.940As a lover of Italy, I was not wanting to believe that they'd be doing this to an innocent
00:03:11.020American, that there was any sort of anti-Americanism going on there, but it for sure was a dynamic
00:03:17.140And as I sort of went back through your story, through the Netflix documentary and your book
00:03:22.520and so on. And a bunch of interviews about you and involving you. I felt the trauma on your
00:03:28.800behalf. It was never ending. It wasn't like, oh, my God, one year of my life was so awful.
00:03:33.800It went on and on and on. And you're still you're still trying to get out from under it in some
00:03:40.720ways. So let's just start at the beginning. I think a lot of people know generally,
00:03:45.320wasn't she that girl, Foxy Noxie, as the newspapers called her? And what happened?
00:03:50.240or she was she did she murder somebody what happened right i think that's how people think
00:03:53.640about your name because they're living their own lives so let's just talk about what happened
00:03:58.660because i think i think if you go through it stage by stage and talk about the evidence and
00:04:04.260what the prosecutor was releasing about you it the story tells itself your exoneration you don't have
00:04:08.500to prove anything it it it tells itself when you realize what was done to you it was deeply wrong
00:04:15.400OK, so let's do that. And then we'll talk about what you're doing today. So take us back to Amanda, age 20. And you decide, as I did when I was the same age, to study abroad as I did in Italy. It's like a dream come true. So you go over there. I'm sure excited for a semester of who knows what. And what was the year?
00:04:34.9002007 so i was 20 years old 2007 a language student and um really for the first time
00:04:44.040going out into the world on my own without my parents right there next door to to be right by
00:04:50.920me and support me so look at your sweet face we're in a way for the first time so we're doing
00:04:56.820this on sirius xm live triumph 111 but we are also do a youtube version of the show and we have
00:05:01.880the picture of you and you're so cute and you're so young and you're so you look so sweet with your
00:05:06.600little headband and you know it's like god god only knew if that girl only knew it was about to
00:05:12.540come her way so you go over there and you you hadn't exactly been a world traveler or you know
00:05:18.600all that experienced in living independently but you managed to find a place to live to find your
00:05:23.720own roommate so it wasn't like where i went i went to syracuse both at home and abroad and they they
00:05:28.600kind of provided all that for you. You did it on your own. Yeah, yeah. I had a number of jobs to
00:05:35.760save up money to be able to spend that year abroad. And when I arrived in Perugia, like I knew that I
00:05:42.480was signed up for classes, but I had to get my own visa. I had to find my own place to live.
00:05:47.620But fortunately, this is a small town where a lot of young people are moving through it. So there
00:05:52.380were a lot of like places to rent. And just outside of my university, there was a young
00:05:57.740Italian woman who was putting up a poster for a room for let. And I met with her and immediately
00:06:02.600we hit things off. So, you know, it was actually a really ideal situation. I was just a few steps
00:06:09.920away from my university in this beautiful little cottage that was overlooking the valley and living
00:06:14.420alongside three other young women who are all students, two of whom were Italian and one of
00:06:19.660whom was British. The Brit was a woman named Meredith Kircher, who you met on September 20th,
00:06:26.5802007 and within 42 days she would be dead and your life would have changed forever bringing you here
00:06:36.860today you um found that roommate and the and the other two gals you found a boyfriend rafael uh
00:06:43.440solacito you'd been dating for just five days which is a little known fact when when meredith
00:06:48.880i think when people like they've called us lovers they've called us boyfriend and girlfriend i think
00:06:54.580that at the time of like to be perfectly honest we knew each other for five days so we were at
00:07:00.020the very beginning of a like very sweet romantic who knows what it was going to be but it was only
00:07:06.360five days old so it wasn't like you know we the way that it was portrayed is that we were like
00:07:12.060in cahoots in some like deep in like inextricable way right really we were just getting to know each
00:07:18.240other right later it will be like part of a sex cult the two of them together it's like well i
00:07:22.140barely know the guy's last name i mean i'm not a sex cult with him um and we're not you know
00:07:27.040plotting murders and so on and in any event um okay so that you you found meredith on september
00:07:33.64020th and and november 1st 2007 um take us to that night you you were not at home that night in your
00:07:42.720apartment no i was not no um so this is the day after halloween um it was like a day off from
00:07:48.720school basically. And we were, you know, I was hanging out with Raffaele that day and Meredith,
00:07:55.600I knew had gone, I had saw her in the morning. She had taken a shower to wipe off the Halloween
00:08:00.460makeup, did a load of laundry, said, I'll see you later. And that was last I saw of her.
00:08:06.100I was around like late in the morning, early afternoon. And then I spent the day with Raffaele
00:08:11.040and I spent the night with Raffaele. You know, as soon as I met this guy and he was so sweet and
00:08:15.860charming. And we made plans to go to another town nearby called Gubio in which we would spend the
00:08:23.300weekend and eat truffles like that. That was the world I was in. And I was technically supposed to
00:08:30.940work that night. I was doing some like basically all around work, like handing out flyers or
00:08:38.640serving drinks at this local bar. And my boss, Patrick Lumumba, called me that night and said
00:08:44.320that I or sent me a text message and said that I didn't have to come in. So I stayed the night
00:08:49.680with Raffaele and we made plans to leave the next day to go to Gubbio. So you decide to swing by
00:08:54.900your apartment before going on your trip. And you you walk in and you as you approach the apartment,
00:09:02.400you did notice something was off. Take us through that walkthrough. Yeah, absolutely. So coming back
00:09:10.780to my apartment. My thought process was, I'm going to go change. I'm going to grab some clothes,
00:09:15.860grab some things that I can take with me to Gubbio. And so I went back to my place and I
00:09:21.220noticed the first thing that was off was that the front door was wide open. And of course,
00:09:26.600this is a huge red flag if you think about it. This isn't the middle of the summer. It's early
00:09:31.260November. It's cold. Why is the front door wide open? Well, I thought that too, except there was
00:09:38.740one little trick to our front door, which is that it didn't actually stay closed unless you locked
00:09:45.800it with a key. So I thought maybe someone left in a hurry and forgot to close the door and lock it
00:09:51.680with a key and the wind blew it open. So there was a plausible explanation, but still it seemed
00:09:57.420off. I went into the house. I called out, hello, is anyone there? No one answered. So I went about
00:10:03.300my business to take a shower. Inside the main area where I was and in my own bedroom, nothing
00:10:08.340seemed amiss. The first next sign that something was amiss was when I went to my bathroom to take
00:10:14.600a shower, I brushed my teeth. And as I was brushing my teeth, I noticed a few droplets of blood in the
00:10:21.280sink. And this is, again, I didn't automatically think at that moment, a few drops in the sink
00:10:29.160of the door open that someone had been murdered. What I thought was, oh, this is a room full or
00:10:35.000this is a house full of girls. Maybe someone had their period, who knows what's going on.1.00
00:10:40.900So I took a shower and I came out of the shower and then I noticed more blood, another splotch
00:10:47.200of blood on the bath mat. And again, I thought that's odd, but it's not like a bathroom full
00:10:53.480of blood. It didn't look like a crime scene to me. It looked like a few drops of blood again.
00:10:58.420So I got dressed. I went to go dry my hair. And while I was in our second bathroom drying our hair using my Italian roommate's hairdryer, I noticed that there was feces left in the sink or sorry, not in the toilet.
00:11:13.880And I thought that is odd. That is not something that my roommates would do. My especially my Italian roommates were very, very meticulous about cleanliness. So I could understand maybe, you know, menstrual issues, but leaving feces in the sink or in the in the toilet totally off.
00:11:34.980I got this weird, creepy feeling that someone was in the house with me and I immediately left and reached, started calling my roommates and reaching out to Raphael or asking Raphael, like, what do you think? Should I, do I need to call? Like, this is something off. I didn't notice that anything was taken from the house, but I feel like I need to know what's going on.
00:11:54.320At that point, I started calling my roommates. Meredith was not answering the phone. Neither was Laura. The only one of my roommates who did answer was Philomena. And Philomena said, definitely come home. We need to check out to see if our house was broken into.
00:12:10.060so rafaeli and i went back together to see what was going on i was feeling creeped out he was
00:12:17.180there to support me and we opened up the door to filomena's room and found it ransacked window was
00:12:24.460broken the entire room a mess meanwhile laura's room was totally untouched we went and checked
00:12:30.600her room and we went to check meredith's room and found that her door was locked and again we thought
00:12:36.400this is really strange because the only time i've ever seen meredith lock her door was when she was
00:12:42.620like changing or something and didn't want to be disturbed so i thought is meredith in there is she
00:12:47.740is she's not answering like we knocked on the door didn't answer rafaeli even tried kicking
00:12:53.080down the door didn't didn't succeed we called the cops rafaeli called the cops to be more specific
00:12:59.640because at that point i didn't even know how to call the cops he explained there was a break-in
00:13:03.560and we stepped outside of the house to wait for the police to arrive within minutes two plainclothes
00:13:12.440police officers arrived and said that they were there because they had discovered some cell phones
00:13:17.160in a nearby garden and we thought wait you aren't here for the break-in call and they said no we're
00:13:22.600here for these cell phones they belong to filomena romanelli and i thought that's weird i was just
00:13:27.320talking to filomena on the phone she's on her way you can ask her about them when she gets here
00:13:31.720philomena arrives the police who are investigating or they don't arrive yet so philomena arrives
00:13:39.200she says those phones belong to meredith i let her borrow an sms card from me so they belong to
00:13:46.620meredith where is meredith and i say well her door is locked and philomena says well someone
00:13:51.880needs to break down the door there was a conversation between her and the police officers
00:13:55.760arguing about whether or not they were allowed to break down the door but ultimately what happened
00:14:00.080is Philomena, her boyfriend, their friends, and the police all sort of charged Meredith's door
00:14:06.780and broke it down while me and Raffaele were standing in the kitchen. And that is when they
00:14:14.420discovered the crime scene. And I think this is a really important point. A lot of people have asked
00:14:21.920me, when did I think everything started going wrong? And of course, it's hard for me to be in
00:14:28.100the hearts and minds of the investigators and the prosecution and how they could think that I had
00:14:33.300something to do with this or not. A lot has been said about my behavior versus my roommate's
00:14:39.440behaviors. And I think that there is a very important difference between my reaction and
00:14:47.700Philomena's reaction in the immediacy of discovering the crime scene. That major difference
00:14:54.380is that filomena saw inside meredith's room and i did not i never saw the crime scene with my own
00:15:03.000eyes and filomena did and so of course filomena seeing meredith's body on the floor blood
00:15:09.860everywhere this horrible nightmare flipped out started screaming started crying was hysterical
00:15:17.820was inconsolable everyone was yelling in italian forcing us outside of the house
00:15:22.740And I barely understood what was going on. I barely understood Italian at this time. I never saw into Meredith's room. I never saw the horror of that tragedy. And so I was pushed out of the house, bewildered, but not horrified because I didn't know what was going on.
00:15:41.540And so when the police and everyone talks about just outside of the crime scene, of course, there's two there's two roommates here to this girl who just died.
00:15:51.080One of them is flipping out and hysterical. The other one is just kind of standing there looking confused and getting a kiss from her boyfriend.
00:15:58.740Well, the big difference is not that one of them is innocent and one of them is guilty.
00:16:03.920It's that one of them knows exactly what's going on and the other does not.
00:16:08.040and so i always that always struck me as a little odd because it's like having lived in italy as
00:16:13.220well for for many months i went over there a few times as an exchange student um the italians in
00:16:20.020general are are bigger in their personalities and in their emotions and there's absolutely no social
00:16:26.100um i don't know caution about showing your emotions or expressing your upset or your tears
00:16:31.420none it's expected americans i would say are a little different in that way i know you you've
00:16:36.260got some german heritage same you know for the germans so i even if you had known to me that was
00:16:41.620never real i don't know if that wasn't a real selling point um in whether you had done anything
00:16:46.820or not but i understand why you're sensitive about it because now you've had a million headlines
00:16:50.640written about every move every turn of your head in the weeks and months that's a fair point megan
00:16:56.880because like that's it you know it's another fair point to say what what constitutes guilty versus
00:17:04.040innocent behavior in the immediacy of discovering a crime scene. And I think there's a lot of
00:17:10.280speculation about the turn of the head or the look or whether or not you would get a hug or
00:17:15.160whether or not you would cry. And I think these are all excuses for people to sort of retroactively
00:17:22.120justify their original opinion about you. But that isn't to say that there aren't actual
00:17:28.000you know, behaviors that do indicate guilt. And a really great example of this is the man who
00:17:34.360actually killed Meredith Kircher, Rudy Gaudet, fled the country. That's I think that's a pretty
00:17:40.200like, you know, I think one could argue that he wasn't just fleeing the country for so that he
00:17:46.120could have a vacation in Germany like he was fleeing the country specifically because he had
00:17:50.660committed this horrible crime and was trying to get away with it. Well, the other thing is, I mean,
00:17:54.460you could easily spin it the other way. If you had gotten hysterical and were out there like,
00:17:59.500oh my God, oh my God, you could easily say, oh, she's acting. She's overcompensating so that0.67
00:18:05.060people think she's upset when she's not. There's no perfect way of handling it. And I've seen0.98
00:18:09.340enough criminal cases to know you really can't deduce that much from a person's emotional state
00:18:14.720when they call 911, when they first talk to investigators. But you're right. Fleeing is so
00:18:20.240much evidence of guilt. They'll allow it in in a court of law as evidence of guilt many times.
00:18:25.680So there you are. And that's where we see the video of you and Raffaele comforting each other
00:18:30.660and you're kissing. Now that I know you'd only been dating five days, that actually makes more
00:18:34.160sense, too. I mean, you find a new hot Italian boyfriend. You're over there. It's like you do
00:18:38.280spend a lot of time kissing. You're young. You're like a babe. You're there. You're scared. You're
00:18:43.160kissing. People would use this against you as evidence of criminality. We now know it's nothing
00:18:47.040of the sort um then then enter we've got to introduce uh Giuliano I always struggle with
00:18:55.240his last name but Giuliano is it Mignani or Mignani what is it Mignini Mignini okay so we
00:19:02.320go with the true Italian Mignini M-I-G-N-I-N-I this is I mean if he wanted you to be the villain
00:19:09.920of this movie, he winds up being one of the villains of this movie. And this guy had a long
00:19:17.360history in Italy before he ever met Amanda Knox. He had investigated a serial murderer there
00:19:22.680who was dubbed the Monster of Florence. And he had made some, I don't know, 10 or 20 arrests,
00:19:29.720all of which were ultimately thrown out. He was censured by the Italian courts. He had already
00:19:36.680been disciplined for unethical behaviors before he met you and he got he was actually on trial
00:19:44.520for abusive office while trying me for oh meredith's murder oh my gosh case yeah so it's not
00:19:51.120like it is here because people hear that and they think well no if that happened to a lawyer or
00:19:54.920prosecutor here he would be he'd be benched you know he wouldn't be allowed to go back out there
00:19:59.720that's not the way it worked there and in fact he's still doing well in his job in italy um
00:20:05.900but he settled on you very early. They brought you, I guess, back to the crime scene after you
00:20:12.340had left that morning. They made you search through a knife drawer to see if anything was
00:20:17.360missing. You started crying and the documentary about you on Netflix shows him reaching all these
00:20:23.920crazy conclusions, right? Like because you cried when they made you search through the knife drawer
00:20:29.760in the home in which your friend had just been murdered, he deduced what?
00:20:35.580He deduced that I was remembering the murder somehow. So again, like this is really like,
00:20:41.820it's a really important point. And I'm glad that you brought this up because again, you talk about,
00:20:45.900you know, what footage is endlessly recycled that is meant to make me look guilty and what
00:20:52.440is forgotten. And of course, there were moments when I was feeling scared and crying. And even
00:20:58.280those were pitched in the in through the lens of me being a guilty person for of me being involved
00:21:03.820and I think that that that is you know that moment when they asked me to search through
00:21:11.340the cutlery drawer to see if there was anything missing that's when I had like this first like
00:21:17.260wave of sudden horror at what Meredith had gone through the full gravity of it the full like just
00:21:23.680pain of it. And I was shocked and scared. And it was sort of my equivalent to Philomena's shock at
00:21:31.480seeing the crime scene herself. Like that was my moment of like sudden realization and horror. And
00:21:37.980I lost it. I was hysterical. But of course, by that point, I was not just a witness in the eyes
00:21:43.800of the prosecution. Another really important point about the difference between the Italian
00:21:48.100justice system and the American justice system is we think that prosecution, the prosecution and the
00:21:54.840detectives work really closely here in the United States. Well, they work even more closely in
00:22:00.040Italy, where prosecutors actually are the head of the investigation in a case. And so they don't
00:22:07.700just take whatever evidence the detectives give them and decide whether or not a case should be
00:22:12.140brought to court. They are there from the beginning, building their case with the help of the
00:22:17.580detectives. And so when my prosecutor decided at the very beginning that I must know something that
00:22:24.100I'm not telling, that he understood that, or he looked at me through this lens of Amanda's not
00:22:32.440being fully forthcoming, and whatever Amanda is experiencing must have something to do with her
00:22:39.260involvement with this crime. The whole system, that's so messed up. I mean, there's a reason
00:22:44.480we separated out over here. And that's one of them is the prosecutor's role is to seek justice.
00:22:50.520It's not to get a conviction. It's to seek justice, no matter what that is. And so if the case as it
00:22:56.900goes along, even at trial reveals to the prosecutor, he or she has the wrong defendant, they have an
00:23:02.780ethical obligation to drop it, to abandon the case because they they're there to get a just result,
00:23:09.580not to put somebody in prison. And yet if you are the investigator, soup to nuts, and then the guy
00:23:14.940who tries the case, they're setting you up to want to get her from day one. Once you've settled on
00:23:20.900somebody, the rest of your days are spent building your case against her. And you really don't have
00:23:26.080much incentive to keep an open mind or think about overall justice. You just want to win.
00:23:31.380And this guy's history showed it. And unconsciously or consciously. I mean, I think there's a lot of
00:23:35.500cognitive science research that shows that you could even think that you have the best intentions
00:23:40.980and yet still be doing what ultimately results to unethical work and an injustice because of
00:23:49.280confirmation bias and because of certain prejudices that you have in your own mind.
00:23:54.480Tunnel vision is a very natural thing that we all get sometimes. But if you are in that position
00:23:59.960of authority who has the power to take away the freedom of a citizen, you should constantly be
00:24:08.100doing self-auditing in order to make sure that you are following the evidence instead of building a
00:24:13.820case and finding the evidence that you want and ignoring the evidence that you don't want.
00:24:18.500To the contrary, this guy Mignini is on the record talking about the accolades he was receiving in
00:24:26.180going after you. And that's where I'm going to pick it up right after this quick break. And later
00:24:31.560we'll get to the media and Hollywood and how Amanda's trying to reclaim her own story and her0.55
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00:25:46.240within a matter of days before, days after the murder. And I just, before I leave the subject
00:25:53.880of this prosecutor, I want to, I want to read the audience, the quote, I was going to play you the
00:25:57.420soundbite from the documentary, but it's in Italian. So that's not much help, much help
00:26:02.160without the subtitles to our listeners. This is what he said, quote, normally people say that
00:26:07.740nobody is a prophet in his own country, but that's not what I experienced. Complete strangers would
00:26:13.960come up to me and ask to shake my hand. They would congratulate me. It gives me satisfaction
00:26:18.940because Perugia is my little homeland. He loved it. He was trading off of gunning for you.
00:26:28.320Yeah. And I think that, you know, the biggest sign of this, it wasn't just Giuliano Menini,
00:26:35.660although he was head of the investigation. It seemed like the entire Italian legal system,
00:26:43.720ultimately, in the end, what was banking on me being guilty in order to not admit fault. And so
00:26:51.020also, I, you know, if I'm going to empathize with someone like Giuliana Mignini, I have to admit
00:26:56.580that we all have ego. And it's really hard to admit when we're wrong, especially when we've
00:27:01.720made a mistake in such a public way. I was arrested before any evidence was made available,
00:27:08.240Any forensic evidence was was there. So they made a gut feeling about whether or not that I was guilty. They arrested me. They imprisoned me. They did a public press conference saying that the case was closed.
00:27:22.200And then, lo and behold, the evidence starts coming back, indicating a totally separate figure who had nothing to do with me, his fingerprints, footprints in her blood, his DNA in Meredith's body, a local known burglar named Rudy Gaudet.0.93
00:27:38.420And they thought, crap, they had imprisoned an innocent person. And this instead of admitting fault at the very beginning, they decided to pursue a case in which a convoluted case in which they were forcing these separate figures with very different pieces of evidence into the same equation and making excuses for why it didn't add up.
00:28:03.180Instead of saying crap, they should have said, phew, thank God, we found out the truth before we put this innocent girl and her boyfriend in jail. But they didn't. They went a different way. So over the course of the next few days, I guess it was about five days, what I read was they interrogated you for nearly 60 hours. And this is an important piece of it, too.
00:28:24.520And I'm not going to say this doesn't happen in the United States, but we have a lot more strict rules on what you're at least supposed to be doing in an interrogation.
00:28:32.400So describe what the police were doing to you over those days.
00:28:37.240So it's interesting because it's almost like my family, especially my aunt in Germany, had a feeling that something was off.
00:28:44.840It didn't make sense to my family that I was spending hours and hours and hours answering the same questions over and over again in the police office.
00:28:57.080My mom, of course, thought there's a killer on the loose in Perugia who almost killed my daughter. I want her to come home. My aunt in Germany is saying, I'm going to come down there and get you. You need to go talk to the embassy. You're clearly not safe.
00:29:11.640But, of course, the police were telling me, no, Amanda, you're a very, very important witness in this case. You were the first person to arrive at home and discover the crime scene. You were the roommate who was closest to Meredith. You are too important to us and our investigation to leave. And I believed them.
00:29:30.620And so I believed them when over the course of those interrogations, they told me that I didn't need a lawyer and that I was not a suspect and that I didn't know and they lied to me.
00:29:45.620They told me that they knew who the murderer was. They had tapped my phone and I had no idea. They went through my phone and found my text message exchange between myself and Patrick Lumumba, my boss.
00:30:00.980And they interpreted that message that I sent him, which was a poorly translated Italian
00:31:52.240just like this. You break down a person's willpower to the point where they'll say
00:31:57.080anything just to get out of the room, just for you to leave them alone.
00:32:00.400And they'll believe anything. Like I genuinely believed at a certain point that the only
00:32:05.600explanation for the police's behavior towards me was that I must have amnesia and I must have
00:32:10.380witnessed the murder. And it wasn't until they stopped screaming at me and stopped hitting me
00:32:15.480that I had a moment to take a breath, to regain a sense of composure and realize what had just
00:32:22.220happened and i recanted immediately but of course at that point the police had already gotten what
00:32:28.060they wanted signed statements from me and so they ignored me they told me don't worry about it your
00:32:33.140true memories will return in the meantime we're going to be taking you to a holding place for
00:32:38.080your own protection then you'll get to see your mom why would they i mean why would they be so
00:32:44.140focused on getting you to point the finger at your boss from le chic right that was the the restaurant1.00
00:32:50.560That was the bar. Why? Like, I could understand them trying to get you to say I did it. But why were they so focused on you getting, you know, getting you to point the finger at him?
00:32:58.940You know, I don't think that they actually thought at the beginning that I did it. I especially we're looking at, you know, a sexual assault murder. These are almost always committed by men. And I think that's something that is overlooked in this case, the way that it's been made so much of a like girl on girl sexualized fantasy crime.
00:33:20.480I'm like, when we're talking about the realities of violence against women, we're talking about
00:33:25.520male against female violence against women.
00:33:29.040And they I think what they believed at the beginning was that I genuinely knew something
00:33:37.620They inaccurately interpreted my behavior to mean that I was not surprised by Meredith's
00:33:44.300murder and that I was that I knew something that I wasn't telling them.
00:33:49.320And so they pressured me into implicating someone because they believed that I knew who it was. And it was over the course of my interrogations that I think they settled upon Patrick, who they didn't know from from Bob or John.
00:34:03.560like they had just seen a text message between me and a person named Patrick on my phone
00:34:08.840in their mind, setting up an appointment. And they thought, this is it. This is the guy.
00:34:16.280Amanda, let him in. Amanda knows what happened. We got to get her to admit it.
00:34:21.600So did they arrest him right away? They arrested him right away without checking his alibi,
00:34:27.360without doing anything, despite the fact that I recanted. And they kept him in prison for two
00:34:33.080weeks, even though numerous people came forward saying that they had been with him the entire
00:34:38.060night. Wow. I mean, it just shows there they had no appetite for the truth. And he question about
00:34:45.100him before we move on from him, because I read that he recently said something like,
00:34:49.980why hasn't she ever apologized to me? Or this is this is not that reason was like 2011. There
00:34:56.440was a quote from him saying she never reached out to me is that still true um and no and i did
00:35:03.180apologize to him in court so i don't know what he means i'm assuming that he's potentially talking
00:35:10.380about how his lawyer at a certain point reached out to me asking for money and wanting me to give
00:35:17.260to admit to this whole situation his imprisonment being my fault and my point was this was not my
00:35:25.520fault i was coerced into signing statements and this is the police's fault i was gonna say they
00:35:30.260should they should sue someone but it shouldn't be amanda knox um yeah okay so so that's patrick
00:35:36.020then he gets out because after you know a short amount of time he's able to prove to them he has
00:35:41.000an alibi and they're not going to be able to pin this on them um and so you're sitting you you go
00:35:47.900to jail they they they not only arrest him they arrest you and they arrest rafael but who's my
00:35:53.860charges. Right, right. But so but no charges are actually filed against you. And you sit there for
00:35:59.040a year before they actually charge you with murder. Yeah. So they sought they sat me there
00:36:05.320for eight months before I was officially indicted and charged with a crime. And that's another one
00:36:12.320of those differences between the American system and the Italian system. In this Italian system,
00:36:16.540they can hold you in custody for up to a year without charging you while you're under investigation.
00:36:23.480Wow. That is scary. So at what point do you say to them, you might want to consider this guy
00:36:30.140Rudy Gaudet, because he was not in your immediate friend circle, but he was kind of on the periphery.
00:36:35.160So it was a name you knew. And when they were asking you, tell us everybody, tell us everybody
00:36:40.260who could be, who's been in the house, who you guys are friends with and so on. You had mentioned
00:36:44.100that name and he was a known criminal. I mean, he was somebody who had been known as a robber
00:36:49.280in the area. He was apparently into drugs. He was on the police radar prior to all of this.
00:36:56.860So I would think that name would have been like, oh, he likes to rob people. Oh, and he'd also
00:37:00.000been he'd also threatened people with knives prior to this. So you'd think that they'd be like,
00:37:04.760red flag. Yes. Let's follow that one up. When did you first mention his name and how long did it
00:37:11.020take them to focus on him? Actually, it's interesting. I didn't mention his name because
00:37:17.140I didn't know his name I knew him to be the guy like I had met him once and sure I had been
00:37:23.080introduced like Rudy but I didn't remember his name I remembered that he was a guy who played
00:37:28.600basketball with the guys who lived below us and I didn't know anything about his history I'd never
00:37:34.760really hung out with him I only knew him from having encountered him that one time and and you
00:37:41.800know I'd seen him around like he played in the basketball court near the university but I he
00:37:47.100wasn't like a friend of mine. In fact, in the very beginning, I had mentioned a character named,
00:37:53.860I think his name was Shaky. His nickname was Shaky, because I remember he was a sort of
00:38:00.900sketchy guy who liked to dance and hang out with Meredith and her friends, who once tried to like
00:38:06.400take sort of forcefully take me home with him. And I raised the police's attention to that person.
00:38:12.580But of course, he had nothing to do with the crime. And I remember the moment when Rudy Gaudet's name was finally made public. It was after they had already found his fingerprints and footprints in her or fingerprints, at the very least, in her blood, in Meredith's blood at the crime scene.
00:38:29.680They they were able to process those fingerprints, identify him from having his, you know, long history of burglaries and identify this person and track him down.
00:38:40.800And there's this like really interesting sort of moment of timing where the police released Patrick Lumumba almost at the exact same time that they arrested Rudy Gaudet so that they had someone sort of a switcheroo that they didn't have to once again admit fault in a big way because here they were, they found the real guy.
00:39:00.720And I remember sitting there in my prison cell watching the news as this happened, as Rudy Gade was being arrested in Germany. And I saw his face. I heard his name. And I thought, that guy? The basketball guy? Like, that's the guy? Like, sure, I've seen him before, but it never occurred to me that he would do this.
00:39:23.240of course, I didn't know about his history of criminality. And I had this like moment of like
00:39:30.580relief even when they found him because I thought, oh, my gosh, this is going to be over soon. They
00:39:36.560found out who really did it. And that it wasn't over soon, of course. But boy, were you were you
00:39:43.820wrong on that? Up next, I'm going to ask Amanda about the lies the prosecutor was openly telling0.99
00:39:49.600about her, the active misleading they did with the press to try to get people to believe that
00:39:55.180it was Amanda, all of which fell completely apart. We're going to do that right after this
00:40:00.140quick break, and we'll come back with Amanda Knox. So Amanda, the prosecutor put out, among other0.99
00:40:10.880things, he and his team put out a picture of a bloody sink. And this sink was covered in blood.
00:40:19.880I mean, it was a wash in red. And they basically were like, she's a liar. She came home. She saw0.99
00:40:26.340that. She didn't think anything was wrong. And it was a complete lie because the actual sink you saw,
00:40:31.820and there are pictures of that too, just had a couple of drops of blood. The picture they put
00:40:35.880out had been treated with some sort of a chemical that is supposed to show them if there's blood.
00:40:40.240and the substance itself is red so it's all over the sink this is my understanding it was an active
00:40:46.520attempt to mislead i mean you could get disbarred for doing such a thing as a lawyer here but this
00:40:52.140is just one of the examples and i know that there are others of the ways in which they tried to
00:40:56.620unfairly portray you in the media yeah and i you know i discussed this on labyrinths with about
00:41:02.720media selection bias because i think there's this ongoing perception that even if i'm innocent i
00:41:09.900I must there must be something wrong with me or there must be this wrongful conviction
00:41:13.860must be my fault because no reasonable person would act the way that Amanda acted.
00:41:19.260And, you know, even as recently as Malcolm Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers, where
00:41:24.860he analyzes the case and he, you know, from the very get go is like, we know who did this
00:41:31.040But he then goes on to say, well, the reason why Amanda was wrongly convicted was because
00:41:36.460she's ultimately an innocent person who acts guilty. And maybe that's why wrongful convictions
00:41:41.800happen. Innocent people act guilty. And I just wanted to push back against that because, again,
00:41:51.080who, first of all, has agency in the equation? Who's the one who's doing the wrongful,
00:41:56.140like the wrongful convicting? Who's the one who is pursuing a case against an innocent person,
00:42:01.400despite what the evidence is telling them, and who is presenting false pictures to the media
00:42:06.340in order to misrepresent the evidence against her in court right who is whose decisions are
00:42:12.380shaping these events they certainly were not mine and if anything i was the one who had the least
00:42:17.940amount of agency in this in this equation so you know when i think about the ways that even just
00:42:26.120the ways that they portrayed meredith versus me right like they acted like meredith and i were two
00:42:34.120extreme opposites of the ideals of femininity. They turned this into a morality play about
00:42:41.640female sexuality and morality. They portrayed Meredith as this perfectly invisible, ideal,0.99
00:42:49.940serious, studious, non-casual person who would never, ever, ever just go out with boys or have
00:42:58.620fun or do anything like that she was a serious young woman who had a fidanzato a fiance someone
00:43:05.020who we can all agree is a perfect victim well of course you don't have to be you know a studious
00:43:11.560person who never goes out and has fun to be a victim of a horrible crime on on the first place
00:43:16.960and meredith was not someone who didn't just like meredith did like to go and hang out and have fun
00:43:21.820with friends and go dancing and have like casual you know relationships like this that was her as
00:43:27.080And on the flip side, there was the portrayal of me as when in reality, I was actually quite similar to Meredith as someone who was uninhibited and and lustful and and at odds, like jealous of Meredith's purity and and everything depraved that you could accuse a woman of, particularly through her sexuality.
00:43:51.160and using that as an excuse to say, well, if she's capable of all of this sex,
00:43:56.960she must also be capable of violence. Very much playing into the Madonna horror dichotomy.1.00
00:44:03.160It's how did they find out the number of sexual partners you had had? I know you've talked about
00:44:07.520it, but like, how did they know that? Yeah. After I was arrested, I was in prison. I was
00:44:16.660very uncomfortably being talked to by an official in the prison who would bring me into a private
00:44:23.740room every day and interrogate me about my sex life. And one day he accompanied me into the
00:44:30.460doctor's office where I was informed that I had tested positive for HIV. And me thinking suddenly
00:44:37.480that I'm dying and my life is over was told by the vice comandante that I should think about and
00:44:44.160write down all of the people that I had ever had sex with in order to determine who had given me
00:44:49.700HIV. So I went right back into my cell, started journaling, crying, thinking that I was dying,
00:44:57.100wrote down every single person I had ever had sex with in my entire life and what kind of
00:45:01.300protection we had used. And the very next day, the police raided my cell and took every scrap
00:45:09.360of paper that I had ever written on. And then a few days later, it was released to the press.
00:45:17.480Oh, it's disgusting. It's so disgusting. You make such a good point about Gladwell,0.90
00:45:24.660who I love and who's, you know, he's on your side, but you're right. He's got it a little wrong.
00:45:30.920You know, and I, in his defense, I get it because we didn't get to like the cartwheels. I'll ask
00:45:34.480you about the cartwheels because that's what people think about. But honestly, it wasn't,
00:45:38.520it wasn't your behavior. People may not really fully understand the extent to which they have
00:45:42.960been manipulated by a dishonest prosecutor who is, he's like the Mike Nifong of Italy. You know,
00:45:50.380he, Mike Nifong's the guy who tried to put those three Duke University kids in jail for an alleged
00:45:55.340rape that they did not commit. And he knew it was false, but he didn't care. That's, that's what I
00:45:59.980think McNini is. And people don't realize at home how he tried to manipulate them from, from the
00:46:07.180sink to he went out and said, Amanda Knox went home and she bought bleach and she bleached that
00:46:12.140entire bathroom. She scrubbed it. Now you look at the actual photos of post Amanda Knox's visit to1.00
00:46:17.720the bathroom. It's covered in blood. It's still got the feces in the toilet. Clearly nobody has1.00
00:46:22.460been there doing any cleaning. And he said, we've got receipts. Well, they never released them.
00:46:26.560There never were receipts showing you do that. But there's never any follow up. Nobody ever goes
00:46:30.740back to the prosecutor and says, where's the receipt? It's just, did you win or lose? And he
00:46:34.400lost and still, whatever, maintained his story. So we've been manipulated. The diary, the HIV
00:46:39.180positive, which was, thank God, untrue. That was a lie. And that leads me to the disgusting,
00:46:46.660vile media, the disgusting, vile media that played along willingly. And I get it. I get it. Very0.97
00:46:52.500salacious. So many elements to the story. You're so beautiful. I mean, that was probably your
00:46:55.880biggest sin in attracting media coverage to this. You know, just you are. You're beautiful. And that
00:47:01.760will sell papers. And thanks, Megan. Yeah. And then like you add in possible sex fiend in like
00:47:08.360some weird sudden, I don't know what they thought you were doing, an orgy where you slip people's0.99
00:47:12.980throats. I mean, it was just none of it made any sense. And as soon as Patrick fell apart as your0.89
00:47:17.140third partner, you, Raffaele and Patrick, your boss, he fell apart because of his alibi. Then
00:47:22.040they just subbed in Rudy. Oh, Rudy was the third guy. They held her down because why? Because she
00:47:26.300wouldn't have sex with him. Like there was nothing. He was making it up, making it up as he went0.97
00:47:30.420along but the media portrayed you i mean there's one of the headlines was satanic sex ritual satanic1.00
00:47:36.700now they called you a she-devil certainly the narrative was that you were a whore um the foxy1.00
00:47:42.340noxy thing came from an innocent thing on your own social media about as i understand you as a0.99
00:47:46.960soccer player and how you were sly as a fox on the on the field i don't i can't even understand
00:47:52.020i've been attacked by the media in vicious ways but nothing compares to this yeah well and it's
00:47:58.880interesting because i wasn't in a place to even defend myself at that point i was locked away
00:48:03.480and at the mercy of what the police was releasing to the press and i i'm so glad that you brought up
00:48:10.480like the the claim that i must have cleaned up my dna because i remember interviewing mark
00:48:17.440olshacker on labyrinths and he said if rafaeli and i could have somehow selectively cleaned up
00:48:24.280our DNA from that crime scene and left all of the other evidence there intact. We deserve a Nobel
00:48:30.540prize for chemistry. It's just it's but it's interesting because that was like if you imagine
00:48:36.900the sort of confirmation bias, the mental gymnastics that my prosecutor had to do to account for the
00:48:43.460fact that here's this crime scene where there's Meredith's body, Meredith's DNA and Rudy Gaudet's
00:48:49.520DNA and fingerprints and footprints all over the space and nothing implicating me or Raffaele,
00:48:57.100Well, in his mind, it was I was somehow able to clean up all evidence, all traces of me
00:49:04.460and in order to implicate Rudy Gaudet.
00:49:07.640And I think the thing that like I mentioned this in the episode of Labyrinths where I
00:49:12.900talk about Rudy Gaudet, because for me, like and maybe we'll get to this later, but like
00:49:17.840For me, I cannot get over the fact that because the police and the prosecution did not want to admit from the get go that there was no evidence against me and that and drop the charges and release me and Raffaele from prison, instead of doing that, they actually pursued a case that let Meredith's actual rapist and murderer off the hook.
00:49:40.700Yeah, he was tried separately from me. He was tried before me. The prosecution was not interested in having him be fully responsible for his crimes. So they never charged him to be fully responsible for his crimes. He was charged with being a part of the murder and but never having actually plunged to the knife himself.
00:50:03.480And so when Rudy Gaudet points to that today and says, well, no one says I killed her. Someone else killed her. It's like, well, the reason for that is because the police and prosecution were covering their butts.
00:50:14.300Yeah, they allowed him the ability to make this argument, this crazy argument, notwithstanding all the proof, pointing to him and only him.
00:50:24.240Now, there was a knife, and this is at the heart of the case.
00:50:27.500The prosecutor claimed that it had both Meredith's DNA on the blade and Amanda's DNA on the handle.
00:50:33.820It's one of the reasons why the trial went south for Amanda.
00:50:36.480And it's also one of the reasons why I don't believe this was an inadvertent mistake by this prosecutor who really was out to get her.
00:50:44.300That's where we pick it up next, and we'll go back into the media when we come back from a quick break.
00:52:28.800He's like he had no reason to say to that person that you weren't there, that you had nothing to do with it.
00:52:33.420But still, this wasn't enough for the prosecutor.
00:52:35.220Your absence of DNA, not enough for him.
00:52:38.240nothing absolutely no proof other than you telling that weird story at the hands of these police that
00:52:43.800maybe patrick did it and maybe you saw some piece of that um but there's one thing there's the knife
00:52:51.000they find what they believe they pronounced it's the murder weapon because they say they tested
00:52:55.640for dna it's got your dna in the handle meredith's dna on the blade this would lead to the stunning
00:53:01.580moment in the first trial, January 16th, 2009, where you stood up to hear the verdict and you
00:53:09.880heard what? Guilty. Coltevole. Oh, so this happens in large part because of the DNA at Evans. And
00:53:19.140what do we now know about that? Well, gosh, there's so much to say about the knife. That's
00:53:24.780not just the fact that independent experts eventually examined it during my appeals trial
00:53:30.000and discovered that, first of all, the result or the DNA trace that was linked to Meredith was so
00:53:37.380small that it actually couldn't be reliably linked to anyone. And furthermore, it was tested
00:53:42.340in the context of 50 other samples of Meredith's DNA. And so contamination couldn't be ruled out.
00:53:48.860But I think that for me, it's astonishing that it got that far in the first place, because
00:53:55.420to believe that this knife was used in the crime, you have to believe a number of very,
00:54:02.780very strange things. The knife didn't match Meredith's stab wounds. And so you have to
00:54:09.100believe that whoever, if I killed Meredith with that knife, I would have half stabbed her with
00:54:16.320the knife, but not all the way. It was a knife that was not found at the crime scene. It was
00:54:21.940pulled at random from a kitchen drawer in Raphael's apartment, which was across town, meaning that
00:54:27.480this crime, the way that this knife could have taken part in this crime is if I was carrying
00:54:35.080that knife with me between Raphael's apartment and my house. And the prosecution has always
00:54:42.400maintained that this was not a premeditated crime. This was a crime that just happened spontaneously
00:54:48.940in this sort of uh drug-fueled orgy atmosphere but if that's true then you are logically saying
00:54:56.320that i'm just carrying around a large kitchen knife in my bag with me for what reason i don't
00:55:02.940know and then brought it back to rafaeli's apartment cleaned it up and put it back into
00:55:08.140the drawer like this i remember the moment when some when the vijay comandante that same guy
00:55:13.880brought me into his office and said how do you explain this knife and i remember being told
00:55:20.100it's meredith's dna her blood is on the knife and i thought i have no idea how that happened
00:55:26.040i felt like i was being framed honestly because i couldn't explain that but of course
00:55:31.320but of course um it wasn't true and when eventually independent experts looked at that
00:55:39.740evidence they threw out any sort of link to meredith or blood in the first place it did not
00:55:45.280test positive for blood and actually it was ruled that it was more likely potato starch from having
00:55:52.080been having for me having used it to cook things wow yeah apparently it was such a trace amount
00:55:59.500and they had tried to amp it up and amp it up trying to get more and more and more through the
00:56:03.220same machine that it just processed 50 other meredith samples and that's how they believe
00:56:07.860it was contaminated, as found by the highest court in Italy, eventually, that this evidence
00:56:13.320had been contaminated and could not be relied upon. But then there was the clasp of Meredith's
00:56:17.960bra. And that, seven weeks after her murder and the evidence was being processed, finally,
00:56:25.200this prosecutor announces he's got Raphael, he's got his DNA on Meredith's bra clasp,
00:56:30.660which had been detached somehow, I mean, presumably during the struggle, from her actual bra.
00:56:35.260Yeah. And I don't I mean, you tell me, Amanda, I look at this and somebody somebody put that there.
00:56:41.040What how else did Raphael's DNA? We know Raphael did not commit this crime or have anything to do with it.
00:56:45.960How did his DNA get on Meredith's bra clasp if it wasn't police misconduct?
00:56:50.380Well, not just Raphael's DNA, also the DNA of two unknown males were also found on that bra clasp.
00:56:57.080And, you know, all I can think of is that Raphael had been to my house, right?
00:57:03.000He had been to my room. He had been in the common area. I think they even found the other trace of DNA that they found of Raffaele in my house was from a cigarette stub that was in like an ashtray in the kitchen.
00:57:15.100And so it's not that Raffaele's DNA wasn't at the house. It just wasn't in the crime scene where Meredith had been murdered. And it wasn't until the police, who were not very highly trained, were going in and out of that room, carrying pieces of evidence with them.
00:57:31.080Like by the time they actually discovered this bra clasp, it was long after not just the forensic police had gone through that house, but also the regular police had gone through like turning over mattresses, throwing clothes around, like ripping apart all of the house looking for not DNA evidence, but other kinds of evidence.
00:57:50.480And it was over 40 days that they were touching things and moving things around without gloves that they eventually then found the bra clasp under a rug somewhere completely different in Meredith's room and said, oh, here's our link proving that Rufa that Raffaele was there in the room that night.
00:58:11.200But of course, there's no other trace of Raffaele in that room. How could he have participated in sexual assault and murder and only left one trace along with two unknown males?
00:58:22.440Meanwhile, like there's a huge semen stain on the pillow found underneath Meredith's body that the prosecution decided not to test and refused to test, even when my defense and Raffaele's defense asked for it to be tested.
00:58:39.620We're looking at a sexual assault case. Meredith was raped before she was murdered and they refused to test it. And the only reason I think of why is because they weren't interested in pursuing a case against a male. They were interested in pursuing a case against me and I don't produce semen. So it wasn't relevant to them.
00:59:03.440My gosh, this is so scary. You know, the question I'm asking myself right now is, did you just have a terrible defense lawyer in the first trial? Like, why? Why wouldn't all of this have been persuasive first time around?
00:59:15.120Well, that's a really good question, because I don't think that I didn't have a good defense lawyer. I think my lawyers pursued a very, very staunch defense in this case. But what was happening was, you know, one of the things that I remember my lawyer saying was zero plus zero plus zero plus zero plus zero still equals zero.
00:59:38.060There was this sense that the prosecution was throwing the kitchen sink at this case. And so if the kitchen, if there's all this stuff that is being thrown into this case and debated and talked about something, there must be some substance to it.
00:59:54.040There must be Amanda's guilt is in there somewhere, even if we can't really determine which piece of evidence is the thing that does it.
01:00:01.180There's so much that's being thrown in there that there must be something to it.
01:00:05.620And indeed, this is what and that got me convicted the second time, you know, after I was acquitted and the DNA evidence in that case with the bra clasp and the knife was thrown out.
01:00:16.100I was still tried for that same crime using this same kitchen sink approach where it's like, oh, Amanda confessed to the crime and all these witnesses say maybe they saw her or maybe they didn't.
01:00:28.040Or how do you explain her DNA in the bathroom?
01:00:30.280Like there's there was this sense of like this overwhelming if if the prosecution is so convinced, there must be something to it.
01:00:37.600And it wasn't like I think it was really, really hard for people to, first of all, put themselves in my shoes and imagine what it's like to be in an interrogation room and coerced into signing statements as a 20 year old surrounded by adults speaking in a foreign language and without the assistance of a lawyer.
01:00:57.680But I think also they couldn't really understand how the case could have gone this far if there wasn't something to it.
01:01:07.880Well, especially back to our original point of the media, every headline telling them how awful you are.0.92
01:01:13.300You're just a terrible person. You're a freak. You're a devil worshiper.1.00
01:01:16.360I mean, just stuff completely made up. A massive manipulation was taking place by the media, of the media, by the prosecutor, of the people. And people need to get smart. You know, they have to be their own advocates when it comes to information consumption.0.90
01:01:34.280if you want to willingly jump in and believe the tabloid headlines just know what you're being fed0.87
01:01:40.140you know it's garbage in garbage out it remains such to this day um so just the quick without0.95
01:01:45.860getting into the lengthy procedural stuff i mean so you were found guilty on nightmare um then0.98
01:01:51.020miraculously it was reversed yay that's what we wanted you were you got to fly home to seattle
01:01:56.740it was like thank god this horrible nightmare is over i'm done whatever and then the the innocence
01:02:02.420was reversed. It was overturned. A new trial was ordered, and you were found guilty again.
01:02:08.480So this is your second time being found guilty. And then thank God that guilty, that conviction
01:02:14.560was reversed again by Italy's highest court, this time for good. And the court cited errors
01:02:22.700and omissions by the prosecutor, sensational failures by the investigator and his helpers,
01:02:30.860and contaminated evidence. I mean, ultimately, they saw what went on here and declared you not
01:02:38.020just not guilty, but you and Raffaele innocent that you did not commit this crime, which is
01:02:44.840huge. I mean, in Italy's defense, that is something we don't do here. And, you know,
01:02:49.000I'm sure a lot of people would like to see it. Absolutely. And it's something that the Supreme
01:02:53.300Court never does. That's why that clip at the very beginning, when you showed me reacting to
01:02:58.760them, it was because that wasn't even something that I dreamed was possible. And of course,
01:03:04.200it's within their power. But it is such a rare thing for the Supreme Court to not just overturn
01:03:10.080a wrongful conviction, but to definitively acquit someone. I'm really glad you talked about the
01:03:16.500media, because I think that, you know, like you said, to this day, we find criminal trials
01:03:22.460becoming politicized. And instead of the media doing its job, which is to hold authorities and
01:03:29.720power to account, to hold them to a higher standard, to the truth, we instead find media
01:03:35.700who are selling us stories that we want to hear. And that is the reason why I got into journalism
01:03:42.860myself, the reason why I'm an independent journalist who only has, the reason I have a
01:03:49.560podcast is because I have subscribers who believe in my work. Like go to patreon.com slash Knox
01:03:55.520Robinson and you can do it. But like, this is like, I'm not, I'm not, you know, like this is
01:04:00.960a world where you, you should, we all need to be a little more media literate because the media is
01:04:08.460not doing what it's intended to do. It is selling a story and it's going to sell the story that
01:04:17.380makes the most money, not the story that is the most truthful. And that's true in mainstream media
01:04:24.980and not just tabloids. That's what people may not realize. One of the things I liked about the
01:04:30.660documentary is it pulled clips of so-called respected news anchors saying a lot of this
01:04:36.820stuff. It wasn't just, you know, the star. It was in the mainstream, these characterizations of you.
01:04:44.020And that leads me to the unfortunate moment that you had with Chris Cuomo, who continued the character assassination in a bizarre interview he did with you.
01:04:54.820We have the tape queued up. It didn't do well at the time. It was from 2013. I was in the primetime at Fox at the time.
01:05:01.860It hasn't aged well. It looks even worse in retrospect. And now it looks particularly bad knowing that he's been publicly accused of sexually harassing his former executive producer, of being such a bully to his female executive producer, a different woman, that she was forced to leave the show.
01:05:17.320and now we have multiple allegations in the news today about him actively campaigning against the
01:05:23.100women who accused his brother, Andrew Cuomo. CNN at this moment is reviewing his future at the
01:05:28.640company. But here he is interviewing you in 2013, fresh off of all of this.
01:05:34.000This is their theory that you went in there for some kind of freaky sexual activity that went
01:05:39.880wrong and your roommate wound up dying. Fair? That's what they say. That's what it is. Forget
01:05:45.200the headlines that's the truth of the proposition isn't it is there truth to that proposition
01:05:50.440were you into deviant sex insensitive question but hey we got to get to what it is this fuels
01:05:56.500the doubt there's no evidence of that but that's the theory nox is into some freaky sexual things
01:06:03.500do you have any type of experimental activities there you're embarrassed to talk about no
01:06:07.860yeah that doesn't age well does it yeah at the you know at the time it's interesting because at
01:06:17.200the time i was putting up with a lot of that kind of thing from media i've learned a lot since then
01:06:24.140and a lot of times people have said to me you know i have to ask you these quote hard questions
01:06:30.220because it's what's good for you you should have the chance to respond this is this is what's best
01:06:35.720for you. And Chris Cuomo, among other people, said this to me as a sort of justification for
01:06:43.140pursuing this line of questioning towards me and questioning me in a frankly humiliating way.
01:06:49.860And I believed him. And the thing that I've realized now as a journalist myself is that0.95
01:06:55.960he didn't actually have to pursue that line of questioning. He could have instead called out
01:07:02.020that theory in the first place, because one, what my sexuality is ultimately has nothing to do with
01:07:09.020the crime. There was no evidence that put me that placed me at the crime scene. So why is my
01:07:14.160sexuality being the thing that's on trial? And instead, I thought that this was an opportunity
01:07:20.740to point out that there is a whole lot of smoke that is deeply irresponsible and is the deeply
01:07:29.300irresponsible storytelling that gets in the way of justice. So, you know, when I think about the
01:07:35.580kinds of like the way that I interview people on labyrinths, I know what the stories are about
01:07:40.820them. That doesn't interest me. What interests me is the story that you can unearth that is true
01:07:47.900and just and puts the person who you're looking at gives them a sense of voice and ownership over
01:07:54.540their own story. The way that I was questioned in that interview was, again, putting me making
01:08:01.060me have to respond to other people's stories about me instead of giving me the opportunity
01:08:06.240to tell my own story, which he would have known with just a minor bit of homework had actually
01:08:12.300no factual basis. There was nothing to it and there never had been. And it would take you about
01:08:17.620two minutes of a Google search to know that. I believe what he was trying to do was gin up a
01:08:23.320sexy moment of him pushing this beautiful, smart, famous woman on, you know, her sex life and whether
01:08:30.880it's deviant in a way that he thought would get clicks or eyeballs or generate something good
01:08:35.820for him. That's what that was about. That's one of the reasons why I find it so infuriating.
01:08:41.560It's maddening to watch that. It's not like having somebody who's actively on trial for their life.
01:08:46.000They're accused of committing a murder. And you say, were you at the crime scene? Did you do that?
01:08:50.280that. Yes, of course, you have to do that. What he asked you wasn't necessary. It was
01:08:54.440intentionally salacious. He was I don't know if he was trying to embarrass you, but he was trying
01:08:58.520to promote himself at your expense, just like everyone before him had done to you so many times.
01:09:05.980Yeah. And and and take in like presenting it to me as the opportunity to address it
01:09:14.040head on, I think was, when I look back on it now, disingenuous, because it's, again,
01:09:20.800not asking me to talk about the way that I was wrongly portrayed and how my sexuality was used
01:09:26.840to vilify me. It was instead putting me on the spot and asking me to sort of respond to what
01:09:33.660was presented as a kind of legitimate question and a legitimate reason to suspect me.
01:09:39.340so and even the tone amanda i mean the tone right like an insensitive question but yeah it's got to
01:09:45.080be like just the way you approach somebody who's been victimized the way you have you've been
01:09:49.500victimized whether you want to call yourself a victim or not you've been victimized rafaeli has
01:09:53.860too meredith obviously um is not that way you know this is i remember when i interviewed tara
01:09:59.080reed joe biden's accuser she said she gave the interview to me because she wanted somebody who
01:10:02.960was quote trauma informed and that i don't know whether tara reed was telling the truth about joe
01:10:08.100Biden or not. But I understood she was making the allegations and how to treat somebody like
01:10:12.180that respectfully while asking about their story and sensitively. Right. And being careful, being
01:10:17.500ginger while still being a good reporter. And it's no wonder she had turned down CNN. And gee,
01:10:23.060no wonder why she turned on Chris Wallace. I'm not surprised by that one either. I just feel like
01:10:27.360reporters that that was about him. And too often they make it about themselves in their pocket
01:10:32.840books and they have no thought for the pain that they continue to inflict on innocent people like
01:10:38.020you um it goes on you know i wonder what you saw what you thought when you saw like the
01:10:43.440the trial of kyle rittenhouse and all the jumping the gun about him um you know we had so many press
01:10:49.320errors i the kyle rittenhouse trial i i mean i i think i have a sort of unpopular opinion from
01:10:56.100you know i tend i run in liberal circles and i i do a lot of social justice but i do think that
01:11:01.460like people really wanted kyle rittenhouse to be a villain and they weren't a lot of people
01:11:08.500weren't willing to take the the evidence of the case seriously um instead were trying to
01:11:15.340convict him based upon us like their interpretation of his character and i think it was radically
01:11:21.960radically irresponsible of the prosecutor to charge him with murder in the first place because
01:11:26.220you know why like this this was not a murder case if you don't like you know there there's
01:11:32.340an interesting discussion to be had about like okay if you walk into a really highly charged
01:11:37.460emotional space that's uncontrolled and you walk into that space with a gun are you provoking an
01:11:43.900attack and i can see from the perspective of of his you know the people who were shot that like
01:11:49.140yeah if you see someone you hear shots around and you see a guy with a gun you might think oh my
01:11:53.380gosh, I got to stop the shooter from shooting people. But that doesn't mean that Kyle Rittenhouse
01:11:58.360did not have the right to defend himself if he was not shooting people. And if you don't like
01:12:03.660the way that the laws are written, then you like if you don't like the self-defense law, then you
01:12:08.260can you can go to your legislature and say that you don't believe in self-defense. But like,
01:12:14.600I think that with the Kyle Rittenhouse case, there was so much focus on irrelevant information and
01:12:20.200character assassination instead of the specific actions that led up to this tragic moment,
01:12:26.540which isn't to say that, like, I think that Kyle Rittenhouse should be celebrated as a hero either,
01:12:30.820because, you know, that's, again, playing him as a political football. He's a kid who made a
01:12:36.380mistake, but he doesn't deserve to spend the rest of his life in prison for it.
01:12:40.020Yeah. There's some similarities in the cases in that, you know, he didn't have quite as much
01:12:44.640coverage as you did. And his story didn't go on as long, but he had the president of the United
01:12:49.900States, now president, then candidate, calling him a white supremacist. I mean, talk about poisoning
01:12:54.000the jury pool. And there is no evidence for that. You know, I mean, even I at the beginning, I'm
01:12:58.820like, oh, well, they said he was with the Proud Boys and he was making racist symbols. And we've
01:13:03.640actually taken a hard look at it on this show more than once. And there's just it's that's not that's
01:13:07.620not what happened. He went into a bar where they were. They came over. They asked for a picture
01:13:11.160with him. He posed. And then they all did the OK sign, which Kyle Rittenhouse, his lawyers presented
01:13:16.080to the judge and the prosecution had nothing to debunk it. He didn't even know what that was. He
01:13:20.500thought it was an OK sign, which it's been since the beginning of time. There was nothing, nothing
01:13:25.500on his social media. They scoured him. The Anti-Defamation League apparently did an
01:13:28.880investigation. The prosecutors looked at all of his cell phones, all his social, nothing. Didn't
01:13:32.600follow a white supremacist, didn't know a white supremacist. It was a lie. And so people are still0.64
01:13:37.840confused about him and want him in jail because they think he hates people of color. There's no
01:13:41.680evidence, right? At some point, you have to say, show me the evidence. And we and if they cannot,
01:13:47.540we as a responsible society have to move on. Absolutely. And also, I would say that, like,
01:13:54.000whether or not he knows that he was doing an OK sign or a white supremacist sign is ultimately
01:13:59.580irrelevant in the same way that, like, if I were a professional dominatrix at the time that
01:14:05.000Meredith was murdered, it also would not have made a difference. It's irrelevant to the question
01:14:11.260of whether or not he's guilty of murder.
01:15:36.080Yeah, great. So I'm not actually familiar with what Biden is doing currently. But what I can say about this is I remember at the very beginning of the Me Too movement, which I do think was an incredibly important moment of like reckoning with the fact that this happens over and over and over again to young or to women in general, not even just young women, but a lot on college campuses.
01:15:58.220is I remember my friend Brian Banks, who tweeted like, yes, you know, we need to be taking these
01:16:05.360accusations really seriously and doing what we can to prevent sexual assault from happening.
01:16:10.060But also here I am, a young man who was wrongly accused of sexual assault based solely on a young
01:16:17.940woman's accusation. And I went to prison and for that crime. And that is unfair. Like due process
01:16:25.560still is incredibly important. And while we need to take sexual assault accusations extremely
01:16:31.420seriously, that does not mean that we don't take sexual assault accusations for the person who's
01:16:38.760being accused not seriously. There is a difficult balancing act of not just fairness, but also
01:16:45.580safety that needs to be brought into consideration. And we can't pretend that if someone who is
01:16:52.620accused, that means that they're necessarily guilty. You are living proof that when due process
01:16:59.000starts getting eroded in the name of something, right, prosecutorial zeal, a desire by the
01:17:06.480prosecution to be loved by the community for having made an arrest, or now, you know, it could
01:17:12.200be different things, pushing of other cultural agendas. It can be devastating, unfairly devastating
01:17:18.780on the person targeted and we just can't start throwing away lives in the name of causes you
01:17:24.100know there's a reason we want the justice system to to follow the procedures we put in place
01:17:28.020long long ago that's the only way we can count on it to work well that's why i think like um
01:17:33.700sexual education is so important because like one of the reasons why these things happen especially
01:17:38.920on college campuses is because these are highly charged sexual environments with young people who
01:17:44.080don't have a ton of experience sexually who are who are you know pushing boundaries for the first
01:17:50.740time exploring themselves and others and of course there are going to be slip-ups and mistakes on
01:17:56.240both sides in terms of communication both physical and and verbal so i think that these are complex
01:18:04.440situations that require us to have sophisticated conversations about them instead of treating them
01:21:13.980So first of all, I have to to point my gaze, my critical gaze on the tabloid media who has decided to give a platform to a rapist and murderer in order for him to continue to harm others by lying and allowing other peoples to take responsibility for his crime.
01:21:34.880So shame on the son, shame on Nick Pisa for the platforming and amplifying his lies, damaging my reputation and honestly just putting the Kircher family through yet more, you know, loops of pain like this, that shame on them.
01:21:52.900But for Rudy Gaudet, I honestly have to say that, like, I was almost rooting for him a little bit, like, here's someone who spent 13 years in prison. I had hoped that he had rehabilitated in some kind of capacity.
01:22:11.360And while I could, you know, he has over the years, ever since he was arrested, taken the opportunity of the prosecution's unfair gaze on me and use that exploited that opportunity in order to not be fully held accountable for his actions.
01:22:28.140I thought that if he had more time and distance from his crimes, that he would have had a more mature response.
01:22:35.460And instead, I believe that he's just continuing to do what he's done since the day he was arrested, which is to exploit the way that this case has been misrepresented and and to try to continue to have me be taken, have me take the burden of his crimes onto my life so that he can continue on with his as if nothing's wrong.
01:22:59.860So I'm so glad you are out there speaking about it because you have a much bigger microphone than he does. And people need to hear your message. Thank you. The the Kircher family. I understand you have reached out to them in various ways and various times over the years. It's a it's a delicate issue. Right. Because I as far as I know, they do still associate me with Meredith's death.
01:23:29.340in some way or another and that's not their fault in the sense that like too they were misled too
01:23:35.760and it's a very very difficult thing to look at objectively when it's someone that you lost that
01:23:42.020you care about so much and so i have let them know through various channels that i am i under
01:23:50.480i understand i that there's this great potential for healing if we can connect and grieve about
01:23:58.000this incredible injustice and tragedy that links us forever. That said, I also don't want to put
01:24:05.720them on the spot. And I'm always hesitant to talk about this when people ask me because I don't want
01:24:10.960to put them on the spot and make them feel like they have to respond to me. That is not the way
01:24:16.000that you achieve healing. So, you know, I want them to know that I'm there and ready whenever
01:24:23.680they are ready. I wonder if it's even harder for someone to get past their beliefs in a situation
01:24:30.420like this, when the imprint that was made on them happened during their most vulnerable time of life,
01:24:36.560you know, when they were at their weakest, hurting their worst. That's when, you know,
01:24:41.100this prosecutor, the press misled them so severely, all the information pointing in the
01:24:46.580wrong direction. It's probably even harder to come back to stasis, where you can take in truth
01:24:52.580and see, you know, separate the wheat from the chaff when, when it, you know, the damage that
01:24:59.060was done to you was done in those circumstances. You know, it's actually a really fascinating
01:25:04.040theory because they call that like cognitive opening. And you know, that's, that's something
01:25:09.580they talk about with like the radicalization of people to terrorism, where something bad happens
01:25:16.200to them. Some tragedy happens to a person like a sister or a daughter dies. And suddenly your mind
01:25:22.560Like your your sort of feeling of security and place and your foundations in the world are shook and you then latch on to a new ideology because it sort of gives you a new sense of purpose and stability.0.97
01:25:40.820And I think you're maybe right that in that moment of intense vulnerability, they latched on to the ideology that the prosecution put forth to them, which is that I am an evil whore who was jealous of their daughter and murdered her for it.0.95
01:25:58.580And it's like the truth is right there.0.95
01:26:01.840And I think once they come to terms with it, they'll they'll somehow feel better.
01:26:07.800I bet it would be a nice moment for the two of you like to come together because you were
01:26:24.600And I always appreciate it when someone tells me, like, I'm sorry, your friend was lost, because that's something that not a lot of people say to me. Like, I'm sorry that your friend was murdered that way. And I do look forward to the day that I get to visit her grave. I just don't want to do that without the permission of her family. And so that's something that remains a deep desire and goal for me.
01:26:54.600Oh, my goodness. It's so complicated. You know, I've been thinking about you a lot lately and I and I thinking about everything you've been through.
01:27:03.520It's like, in a way, you were given a huge, hefty gift of wisdom, wisdom early in your life.
01:27:12.000You know, like you learn so much about police and law enforcement and, you know, the justice system, media, human nature.
01:27:20.940Yes. Yes. Right. Human nature and the importance of family. Right. And the support and all that. It makes me want to ask you whether like if you could undo that, of course, you would undo what happened in Meredith. But if you could undo what happened to you, would you?
01:27:37.480you know that is a question that i never ask myself because none of us ever ever ever get
01:27:45.540to choose that and instead i think my goal um with my my life and also my on my work now with
01:27:53.760labyrinths is to look at how when we are at our most lost how do we find our way out and what do
01:28:01.340we gain in the process? Because of course, there is the opportunity to lose so much, but there's
01:28:07.620also so much to gain in whatever struggle that you are going through. Post-traumatic growth is
01:28:14.200a real thing, just as much as post-traumatic stress is. And we all have the ability with a
01:28:20.680sort of mindfulness to examine whatever it is that life throws at us and try to make the best out of
01:28:27.600it. And I'm always, always, always fascinated by the stories of people who similarly find
01:28:33.420themselves in different situations of feeling lost or the existential crisis of their life
01:28:38.160isn't what they thought it was going to be. And they found their way somehow.
01:28:44.280It's great to hear you say that. I completely agree with you. But it's great, too, to see,
01:28:48.900you know, people, you get upset, you lose a job or you don't get that house you really wanted or
01:28:54.360whatever it is. Have you been convicted of murder when you didn't do it and sat in a foreign country0.96
01:29:02.120thinking, I will never get out of here. I will never get married. I will never have children.
01:29:07.500I will never be able to hug my family again. Like that is next level stress. When you look back on
01:29:15.360it, what would you say was the lowest moment? Was it when you heard guilty in Italian or was it
01:29:22.360a different time, like sitting back in the prison cell?
01:29:25.560No, the scariest, scariest moment was in that interrogation room when I was made to,
01:29:31.260I was, I started to doubt my own sanity. That was the scariest moment for me in this entire process.
01:29:39.740It was the one where I felt the most vulnerable. And, and then years later, I still felt a ton
01:29:48.660of self-blame until someone finally presented me with the actual truth about coercive interrogation
01:29:54.960techniques. I had no idea. I think the thing that makes innocent people so vulnerable to wrongful
01:30:01.860conviction is the idea of being wrongly convicted is not on our radar. Our minds will come up with
01:30:09.620any other explanation for why this bad thing is happening to us, including self-blame.
01:30:14.260and especially when the world is blaming you it's very easily easy to believe the rest of the world
01:30:20.280that you're just there's something wrong with you and i'm really grateful to those who are
01:30:25.280dedicating all like their careers to studying this and revealing the truth about these these
01:30:31.240processes and in the meantime like you know i'm not one to compare tragedies because i can't tell
01:30:39.200you, like I interviewed a ton of women for Labyrinths about infertility and how they had
01:30:45.920lived their whole lives knowing that they were going to be parents, they were going to be mothers.
01:30:49.800And suddenly they were faced with the realization that, oh my gosh, I'm struggling with this. And
01:30:56.360oh my gosh, am I ever, is it ever going to happen? And how you have to retell yourself who you are
01:31:02.360in light of these kinds of struggles is real and is like some of those interviews that I had with
01:31:10.340those women are some of the most emotionally impactful interviews that I've ever had with
01:31:15.260people. Wow. I know you lived some of that yourself. You did just have a baby girl. I mean,
01:31:22.220you just had her, right? Is she even two months old? Oh, yeah. I still have like throw up on me
01:31:26.180a little bit. Oh, my gosh. First of all, you look amazing. So she's healthy. Eureka, right? Her name
01:31:33.200is Eureka. I love it. You're now Mrs. Robinson. And you and your husband does the podcast with
01:31:39.740you. Absolutely. Yes. So we are co-hosts, co-producers. We do everything ourselves. We do
01:31:45.720not have like a team of people behind us. We are independent. We are ad free. So if anyone wants
01:31:52.920become a patron to support our work. That's how we do what we do. Wow. All right. So I've got to
01:31:58.500ask, like, what was it awkward or difficult to find, you know, love after all of this? I mean,
01:32:04.320all the stuff that's been said about you. And I like I would imagine there was enormous pressure
01:32:08.740on him. Like, oh, God, I don't know how to act or how to be. Well, you know what? Chris is an
01:32:15.820incredibly was the perfect person for me to meet because he's not a true crime guy. He didn't
01:32:21.060follow the case um when he started when he became friends with me we were friends at first like
01:32:26.180other people would come up to him and ask him like do you think she did it or didn't she do it
01:32:29.940and he was like look i'm not interested in that lens through which to view her i'm interested in
01:32:34.680this person that i met like a regular person and how we interact and of course eventually when we
01:32:40.820started dating officially and people noticed um and started photoshopping knives into pictures of
01:32:47.880him and making claims about what kind of person he was to even associate with me, he did eventually
01:32:53.720do the Google search and read, read all the case, you know, the case files and read my book and do
01:32:58.600all the research so he could be informed. But that wasn't the lens through which he first viewed me.
01:33:04.760And it's been, you know, that's the ongoing struggle. Like I am for better or for worse,
01:33:10.980for worse, defined by a crime that I had nothing to do with. I am defined by someone else's horrific
01:33:19.240actions. And as much as I try to put good work out into the world to this day, that is not what
01:33:26.940people know me for. And so that's, that's sort of my ongoing struggle is trying to acknowledge my
01:33:36.220experience and put my perspective to good work and not allow others to use my experience and
01:33:43.540exploit my story for their own ends and at my expense. Yeah, I know. Raffaele has spoken
01:33:50.100publicly about the same feelings for him and difficulties he's faced because of the media
01:33:55.280storm and the unfair conviction. And I love with the New York Times, I will I'll give a shout out
01:34:01.440to the New York Times, what they said about you in doing the story. I think it was about the birth
01:34:05.280of your daughter, but they were saying Amanda Knox's legal purgatory has ended. Her cultural0.85
01:34:10.800purgatory has not. And it needs to. I mean, you're not the only one who should be fighting for truth0.99
01:34:17.220here. The people who put you in this position, which includes the media, need to do their part
01:34:24.100and certainly not pile on and continue the abuse. But to say what we know is true, which is you had
01:34:30.620nothing to do with this crime. We know who committed this crime. His name is Rudy Gaudet.
01:34:34.200He's served a sentence that was rather close to a slap on the wrist.
01:34:39.160And what I pray for now is for people to realize that, for you to have health and wellness
01:34:43.840and many more children, if that's what you want.
01:34:46.860Keep telling your story and keep helping others.
01:34:49.200I feel like there's a reason you've been through this.
01:34:51.680And I feel like we're all starting to see what it is.
01:39:19.980and you've handled it with such dignity.
01:39:22.320I appreciate the fact that here we are 25 years later, and you're still, still trying to keep interest on the case and try to call attention to what you need, you think, to solve it.
01:39:33.240And there's breaking news, I should say, about the detectives involved in your case.
01:39:39.940The very guy who interviewed you and Patsy, who you've been kind of complaining about, like he didn't follow up on leads, he didn't do this, he didn't do that.
01:40:36.240Right in the beginning, the Denver police offered to put two experienced homicide detectives on Boulder staff at Denver's expense for as long as they needed them.
01:41:06.920The detective's name was Tom Trujillo.
01:41:10.240He was one of the lead investigators in JonBenet's case.
01:41:12.820He just received an involuntary transfer to another division where he's going to be working the midnight shift, not a promotion, in addition to a three-day suspension.
01:41:23.740And they've basically said that he and another were not—they were not investigating, appropriately investigating several cases.
01:41:32.240They said JonBenet's case was not one of them.
01:41:35.080These are the cases that he's being accused of, you know, half-assing it on were not homicide cases.
01:41:41.000but he is being accused of not doing his job and not following through on leads and so on and other
01:41:48.580significant investigations do you feel you know validated at all by that well it in a way yes
01:41:57.400um we've uh we've known that he's been a problem and not really capable of uh thinking out of the
01:42:05.460And more importantly, his arrogance, I guess, and ego prevented anybody from coming in to help.
01:42:17.300You know, our system, the way it's set up, it's kind of crazy.
01:42:20.060But, you know, there's 18,000 police jurisdictions in this country.
01:42:23.660Each one's a little island of authority.
01:42:25.900And if crime happens on that island, it's up to the local police to deal with it.
01:42:31.460And with the acceptance of a few things like bank robberies, nobody can come in and help them unless they're invited.
01:42:38.500And that's a real crazy system because there's tons of qualified help that could have come in, wanted to come in.
01:42:48.040But unless they were invited and asked to come in to help, they can't.
01:42:58.160And that's really what I'm very critical of the police department on that issue.
01:43:04.700Of course, because you see the bigger cities tend to have a higher homicide rate and thus more experienced homicide detectives and people who know how to preserve a crime scene and, you know, preserve evidence.
01:43:16.440That was one of the major problems right from the get-go with this, which let's take a step back now and set up the crime so that people have a better feeling for what they did and didn't do and why you really kind of want this case wrested from them right now.
01:43:34.960You know, there should be a statute of limitations for the police.
01:43:37.080If they haven't solved it, they should be able to be compelled to give the evidence to the family or to somebody else who might be able to have a go at it.
01:44:50.400So you go over there and you go ahead.
01:44:53.600Well, I say the friends we visited have kids our age, our kids' age.
01:44:58.260And so they were buddies and it was a logical place to have a family get together.
01:45:04.560So what time did you get home from that dinner?
01:45:06.920Well, I think, if I recall, it was about 9.30.
01:45:13.820JonBenet had fallen asleep on the way home, and it was only maybe six blocks, but she was tired.
01:45:20.100She'd been up all day and having fun and playing, and so I carried her upstairs and put her on her bed,0.54
01:45:26.720and then Patsy came up and got her ready for bed and tucked her in.
01:45:31.760So Patsy put on JonBenet's pajamas that night, and this would later become an issue.
01:45:36.780what she was wearing. What did Patsy put JonBenet in? I don't remember, quite frankly.
01:45:47.420I'd have to look at the pictures, but it was just nightclothes.
01:45:52.620But my understanding, the reason I ask you, Jon, is that I've been reading up on the case that
01:45:56.420there was an allegation that Patsy said she put her in a red outfit, like red PJs.
01:46:00.740And when she was found, she was in white. Is that familiar to you?
01:46:05.740Yeah. Well, I didn't know, but I don't know about the red nightgown. I hadn't never heard that, but when I found her, she had on like a black and white pants and, and a top.
01:46:21.700Okay. So Patsy puts her in bed. So probably by 10 o'clock, JonBenet was in her bed.1.00
01:48:28.780Um, we, uh, retired and, and, um, you know, we, we always assumed Boulder was kind of a, you know, Ozzie and Harriet flowers coming up quiet, safe place.
01:50:35.160And we had taken him over to the neighbors before we went out to dinner because we were going to leave town the next morning and have a second Christmas with my older children.
01:50:44.160And then we had a reservation for the family on the Disney Big Red Boat.
01:50:51.040And that was our, you know, take place, you know, right after Christmas.
01:50:55.040So we took the dog and took him to our neighbors, and they were going to take care of him until we got home.
01:52:19.960Um, I think with virtual certainty, we're, we're, we're sure a stun gun was used perhaps when she was asleep in her bed.
01:52:36.340Uh, don't know that for a fact, but, but yeah, I think if we, if she had screamed or, or, uh, um, there'd been noise, we would have, we would have heard it, I think.
01:52:48.640There were marks on her face and I think her neck, too, that suggested a stun gun had been used on her.
01:52:54.240John, forgive me because I don't know the answer to this, but what would a stun gun do to a person when used?
01:53:01.180I mean, would it incapacitate you for a time?
01:53:07.180I don't know, but we had it looked at.
01:53:14.980police discounted that idea and we had it looked at by a a doctor who specializes in that kind of
01:53:23.020stuff somehow and he said with 99 certainly those are stun gun marks yeah but i think
01:53:31.020because we didn't hear anything uh we you know you would think at least if this creature had come in
01:53:39.240and and uh started to take jamania from her bed she would have screamed and we would certainly
01:53:44.240I've heard that. Yeah. Even if he covered her mouth, you'd hear something, some sort of signs
01:53:50.200of a struggle. But if the stun gun were used, and of course, I know that you found her with duct tape
01:53:54.880on her mouth, that could have kept her quiet. All right. So let's back up. So Patsy comes
01:54:01.160downstairs early. They say it was 5.52 AM was that 911 call. So it was early in the morning. You say
01:54:07.440you were taking a trip. And was that your first sign that something was wrong? She finds this
01:54:12.920ransom note at the bottom of the stairs and then what does she come find you or what happens now
01:54:17.300well she screamed and it was you know i was getting ready uh to get dressed and she screamed
01:54:24.340i could tell from the scream it was a something was very very wrong and i ran down and and she
01:54:31.440had this ransom note and um you know it was just a unbelievable uh thing and uh we went or i did i
01:54:44.900think i did it looked to make sure brooke was okay because his bedroom was on kind of the other end
01:54:50.500of the house and he was still in bed and appeared to be asleep so um he knew he was safe and uh
01:54:59.060And so I, you know, I took the note and, I mean, she, Patsy explained, said, hey, this is a ransom note, Gemini's gone and checked her room.
01:55:09.320And so I tried to grasp what was in the ransom note, it was three pages, and just told Patsy to call the police, call the police, call 911.
01:55:23.320And, of course, funny thing, we were as criticized for that because the ransom note told us not to do that.0.55
01:55:53.860I think it's worth reading so that the audience can understand how bizarre it was.
01:55:57.660Before we do that, I want to play the longer Patsy 911 call because to this day, even though you've been totally exonerated, people say, oh, the parents did it.
01:56:06.280You know how that, you know how it was, John.
01:56:07.880That'll continue even after the killer's arrested and convicted.
01:58:33.520I tell people it's like when if you're with your child and you're at a department store or grocery store and you look around and the child's gone, you have this instinctive, just horrible feeling in your stomach that, you know, where's my child?
01:59:13.180And the moment of relief when you find your child well is overwhelming.
01:59:17.680And you kept waiting, kept waiting for that to happen.
01:59:22.140And you can hear Patsy, you know, waiting for it with the 911 operator and doing the only thing you can do at that point, which is pray to Jesus.
02:04:06.440I mean, I've been told, too, that in a way it's a gift because I've been told by handwriting experts that with that long of a sample, three pages, if we had the handwriting of the killer, it'd be very easy to conclusively say this person wrote this note.
02:04:25.680It's a big sample of their handwriting.
02:04:27.740What did the handwriting analysts say could be gleaned about the writing?
02:04:32.020Could they tell anything about age, gender, psychological, state, any of that?
02:04:38.600Well, we didn't get that from the handwriting people.
02:04:40.920Typically, they just told us what their findings were.
02:04:46.120And they rank their findings on a scale of one to five.
02:04:51.240One is absolutely this person wrote it when they're doing comparison.
02:05:03.680And you say, well, why four and a half?
02:05:05.620And I was told that there's, depending on who you're taught to write, what generation, there are certain things that are kind of common, but they're not significant and they're not a lot of them.
02:05:20.320So the police were told, hey, you guys better look somewhere else because we don't see that either parent wrote the note.
02:05:31.680Wait, but wait, wait, wait, back up. Cause I thought you said one means you wrote it. Five
02:05:36.060means no way. Is it, is it the, and that you, they, then you just said that you were a one
02:05:40.820suggesting. Oh, no, I was five. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You were five and Patsy was a four
02:05:47.480and a half. Okay. So you were both on exactly the scale of, you didn't write it or there's
02:05:52.100virtually no chance that you wrote it. Right. Yes. Okay. Got it. Um, so what about, what about
02:05:58.640since then, the psychologist, the psychiatrist, I'm sure you've had people like that, FBI profilers
02:06:03.940who have read it. And were they able to glean any sort of a profile from it? Yeah. John Douglas,
02:06:10.300who started the whole FBI profiling program and is pretty much considered the top of the heap as
02:06:17.520far as that skill set and accomplishments. We spent a couple, three days with him early on.
02:06:24.560because our attorneys asked him to to spend some time with us and um but his conclusion was
02:06:33.040and prediction is it's a young person fascinated by movies you know probably in his 20s maybe early
02:06:39.86030s um and he said this was not about john bonnet this was directed at you to hurt you john
02:06:47.800somebody is either extremely angry with you or extremely jealous of you and this was done to
02:06:57.100hurt you and i thought well i couldn't possibly know anybody that i've made angry that to that
02:07:04.180degree and he said you may not even know who they are they've either observed you in the newspaper
02:07:11.240or, you know, whatever, and developed this either anger or jealousy at me.
02:07:20.300That was John's conclusion, and I think he's right.
02:07:25.400Now, Lou Smith, who was the legendary detective from Colorado out of retirement,
02:07:30.940was put on this case by the district attorney early on.
02:07:35.220And Lou felt it was a kidnapping going wrong.
02:07:38.840And I always thought, well, those are two opposite theories.
02:07:44.420And Lou is a legendary detective in Colorado.
02:07:48.120And somebody pointed out to me recently that, well, that could be, those two are not incompatible, those two theories.
02:08:02.300Right. And that thought hadn't occurred to me in a good while because I thought, well, here you got two top experts saying, giving me two different theories, but they're compatible.
02:08:16.180But what about, I mean, the thing about just random intruder coming in that doesn't make sense, if you look at the note, is how do they know?
02:08:27.960The 118,000, how would they know your bonus?
02:08:30.500I mean, it has to be somebody who, and I realize there's a chance they just randomly picked the number that was your bonus, but it seems like a small chance.
02:08:37.200It seems much more likely somebody who worked at your company or had reason to know that that was your number.
02:08:42.500Well, there's two ways I guess they could have known that.
02:09:55.620What did they say, John? What did they say about, and I want to know, did they go and speak to everybody at your company? That'd be the first place I would start as a detective, right? Somebody knows what he made. Somebody doesn't like him. They've made that clear. They know where his roots are. They know you're from the South. So let's talk to everybody from the company.
02:10:17.180well that kind of stuff just wasn't done they should have done a neighborhood survey that
02:10:22.820morning gone around the houses to the neighborhood and you know if you see anything unusual what have
02:10:27.060you you know they didn't do any of that so they basically in fact the detective the only detective
02:10:33.540so-called that was there that morning concluded that i was the killer because quote she saw it
02:10:40.580in my eyes. And that became the conclusion before they had even looked at evidence or
02:10:47.820investigated anything. This is Linda Arndt. Yeah. And we were just dealing with incompetence.
02:10:58.620Well, in Linda's case, not just incompetence, but maybe a desire to cover up her incompetence,1.00
02:11:04.680because isn't she the one who said, search the house after seven hours of sitting there?1.00
02:11:24.000In fact, to show you what kind of environment she was working in, the chief of police said, we didn't treat this as a crime scene because it was a kidnapping.
02:11:32.800And you shake your head and think, where do these people come from?
02:11:37.500uh horrifying i mean just because at that point they didn't know that it was a homicide
02:11:42.920you got a six-year-old girl has been taken from her bed in the middle of the night that's
02:11:46.640five alarm fire yeah exactly if that's not a crime i don't know what it is
02:11:51.660but that was the quote but because i have i could give you a dozen quotes that were just
02:11:57.820astounding from the police department over the years but that was really the first one that was
02:12:02.180just uh unbelievable what what about the misspellings and the improper grammar and the
02:12:12.120use of the word attache which is not really a thing we say in america um it can mean either
02:12:18.880you know diplomatic assistant or it can mean bag in the way they're using it here but it's a bizarre
02:12:23.660they said that we're a small foreign faction just for people who think you know forgive me again for
02:12:28.720raising your son. He too was ruled out, as I understand it, by the DNA in 2008.
02:12:32.940But this is not the writing of a nine-year-old. We're a small foreign faction. You got to use
02:12:38.900your head. But anyway, these misspellings and the improper grammar throughout tells us something.
02:12:44.560It could be used intentionally, but this doesn't sound like a very well-educated person.
02:12:51.220No. I got a letter. We had a lot of people trying to help, and I got a letter from a teacher of
02:12:58.040She taught English to non-English speaking people, and she said the misspellings in this are typical of a Hispanic person migrating to English based on her experience teaching them to read and write English and speak English.
02:13:20.680And I thought that was pretty interesting and possibly could explain that.
02:13:25.840And, you know, we were a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin and or at that time, just Lockheed.
02:13:33.400You know, I take that. You'll see. Well, anyway, Lockheed Martin bought Lockheed sometime in there.
02:13:37.420But we had to they required us to put a sign on the front of our building, which is downtown Boulder, a Lockheed Martin Corporation.
02:13:45.760And at the time, I thought that's like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
02:15:33.220But, frankly, John said you may not even know him.
02:15:36.040So, you know, we'd been in the paper a few weeks before having hit, for us, a significant sales goal and our marketing people wanted to put it in the paper.
02:15:46.720And I sort of had this gut feeling that that's not really a good idea, but I wanted our people to be proud of their company.
02:15:57.280And that could have targeted me because I had a picture of me in quotes and stuff in the paper.
02:16:06.040That could have been a you never know how you're affecting a sick mind who's going to transfer on to you.
02:16:13.400Who knows? Yeah, that's that's the problem.
02:16:16.340We had people, you know, we we hired two detectives to to work this early on because we knew the police weren't capable of it.
02:16:25.080And in fact, we tried very hard early days to get the case moved somewhere else to another jurisdiction.
02:16:30.460They could put it in the sheriff's department's office, which is a competent organization.
02:16:34.580there was at the time, and had dual authority over it.
02:16:37.780We could have very easily had a sheriff's officer come to our home that morning
02:16:42.860and sit at the city police department, and that was a tragic first mistake,
02:16:48.300I guess, or luck of the draw, that that's what happened.
02:16:52.520And so, you know, it just wasn't ever properly handled and to this day is still not properly handled.
02:17:07.660Well, and the theory that it's someone who didn't like you, because, of course, the other theory is that it's some pedophile, right?
02:17:13.560That's what a lot of people believe it's a little girl.
02:17:15.860Well, those are the two conflicting, and I thought at the time, conflicting theories between John Douglas and Lou Smith.
02:17:23.680Well, I thought we were talking about someone who knew you versus random intruder, but random intruder doesn't necessarily mean pedophile there to get your little girl, right?
02:17:33.680Because that's one of the questions in the case about whether she was the victim of somebody who was a pedophile or whether it was somebody who just hurt her, right?
02:17:43.760Because it was unclear, forgive me for the details, John, but it was unclear whether she was sexually penetrated by a man.
02:17:53.060Well, first of all, this was not a random intruder.
02:17:57.760This is somebody who had watched us, knew what our patterns were, knew we were going to be out that evening, left the note on the back stairway, which is the stairway we always used, but would not have been obvious to somebody that just came into the house.
02:18:15.960We had a front stairway, but we never used that.
02:18:19.900And so why did they leave the ransomware on the back stairway?
02:18:22.540How did they know that's where we would be coming down in the morning?
02:18:27.760Um, so it would have, I mean, there's some elements where somebody could have come into our home. It was not a hard home to break into and regret to say, um, and really understood where things were and, or they, they could have been in the house for hours before, uh, we got home.
02:18:48.600But are we sure that the person, that sexual gratification was a goal of the killer?
02:22:34.820John Ramsey's been saying, even if you didn't find fingerprints, there might have been DNA.
02:22:39.160even if the person had worn gloves, there might've been DNA on that letter. Has it been tested? If
02:22:46.480not, why not? Apparently there are several crime scene items that have not been tested for DNA,
02:22:51.700even in 2022, when touch DNA is out there, DNA has evolved so much. We're going to discuss all
02:22:56.720of that with John, plus the neighbor, Amy, a young girl who was sexually assaulted by a man
02:23:01.740in her bedroom in the middle of the night, just months after John Benet. Wait until you hear what
02:23:06.160the police did in that case. So John, on the subject of the, the ransom note, before we leave
02:23:16.640that, there had been a draft addressed to both of you. Then the final was just you. It was written
02:23:21.400on a legal pad found in your home. And that's the question, whether, was it, were there any
02:23:27.180fingerprints? Has it been tested for DNA? Do you know where it came from in the house? And was that
02:23:32.240area tested for fingerprints etc at the time i don't know uh i think the my feeling was that the
02:23:41.800forensics people that came in did a pretty good job in finding uh a palm print that was unidentified
02:23:49.940trying to track to anybody uh um footprints that don't match any shoes of ours in the house
02:23:58.580things like that but whether this stuff was ever tested or not i don't know we know there's
02:24:03.920five or six maybe seven items that were originally taken from the crime scene
02:24:08.680sent to an outside lab for testing along with others and five or six of those items were not
02:24:15.780tested they were returned to the police i don't know why the police didn't want to pay for it
02:24:21.320because back then it was expensive to do dna testing uh but we know there's five or six items
02:24:26.920had never been tested. And so what else wasn't? I do know that the forensic people spent about,
02:24:33.120the detectives spent a couple hours in the house and then told the DA, well, we're finished. And
02:24:37.820he said, you can't be finished. Get back in there. So they took a very cursory look at it
02:24:45.660and then were ordered back in by the DA. A forensics investigator experienced one told me
02:24:53.340They'll spend three days on a murder site looking for evidence, not two hours.
02:25:01.620So God only knows what was compromised.
02:25:04.200And I know Linda Arndt, the detective, also didn't secure the scene.
02:25:08.020She let your friends come over and come into the house.
02:25:10.560She sent you to look around, as we discussed.
02:25:12.920And then after you found JonBenet, as I understand it, she actually moved JonBenet's body again from one spot to closer by the Christmas tree, which just should never be done.
02:25:23.340when you're dealing with a homicide victim.
02:27:17.400And so we, then I went into the, the only other room in that basement was this, we called it a wine cellar, but it was an old coal cellar, dark, one door going into it, no entrances from the outside.
02:27:37.000And I opened the door and, of course, immediately found JonBenet.
02:27:40.060And, you know, I don't, we heard Lindar say on the media or on an interview that, well, I told him to go from top to bottom and he started out in the bottom.
02:29:25.740That was the last time we were in that home.
02:29:28.460John, can I ask you, because I know that one of the things that JonBenet was wearing was her cross, her cross necklace, and according to what I read, and we heard Patsy praying to Jesus, you know, to help her, help her, and I wondered if you were a family of faith and if, you know, what this did to that, right, if you were able to carry that on.
02:29:52.140Well, that's a good question. And I really had to face that issue when my oldest daughter was killed in a car accident about four years before. And the first words that came out of my mouth was, there is no God. There is no God. How could a loving God let this happen to a beautiful young child? She was 20, 21.
02:30:12.660And but it really forced me to think about my faith.
02:30:18.260And I spent I had a friend came alongside of me and said, I'm going to help you study the Bible.
02:30:22.840And and he was a real mentor to me in that struggle to to understand why why this would happen.
02:30:33.720You know, I. I was a Christian, I had joined the club, you know, if you're in the club,
02:30:38.920that you shouldn't be subject to harm or tragedy.
02:30:43.980And, of course, that's not at all what the Bible says.
02:31:03.120But I'd kind of wrestled that down to, yeah, there is more to life than just what we see here.
02:31:08.640And so when we lost JonBenet, I didn't have to go through that struggle.
02:31:17.040You know, I'd already been through, why did God let this happen?
02:31:23.320So it was, my faith was not challenged when JonBenet was killed, only because I'd gone through that challenge when I lost my oldest daughter.
02:31:32.680Mm-hmm. Then you go through the added pain of being not outright accused by the authorities,
02:31:40.180but pretty close. I mean, the DA earlier, before Mary Lacey, the DA said they didn't do it. The
02:31:46.200DNA rules them out. Four months after JonBenet died, the DA, Alex Hunter, said Patsy and John
02:31:53.560are the focus. They're the focus. Opened up a grand jury proceeding, and the grand jury came
02:31:59.260back and said, don't see anything that you're going to be able to pursue as a, you know,
02:32:03.340beyond a reasonable doubt. And the DA ultimately had to admit that. But I mean, you're going through
02:32:07.960being accused. And then on top of all that, John, you've got the media coverage, right?
02:32:12.880Which basically tried to make JonBenet and Patsy into this bizarre daughter, mother team.
02:32:21.060You know, she was exploited. She was sexualized. The beauty pageant videos on endless loop,1.00
02:32:27.880an endless loop. So talk about that for a bit and what that was like for you.
02:32:32.240Well, you know, the media, of course, jumped on it, but they were being fed information that was misleading, wrong.
02:32:40.540And we were told by Mary Lacey several years after she got into her position as the due DA,
02:32:46.380she said that was the police strategy that was defined to them by someone, whether it's the FBI or some wacko psychologist.
02:32:53.120put intense pressure on the family we know it's one of the two they're in the house either the
02:33:00.120father killed her or the mother did one of them will confess eventually if we put enough pressure
02:33:06.100on them and and mary lacy the da said that was their strategy to solve the case and so they
02:33:11.600released a lot of information misleading information incorrect information to the media
02:33:17.160And, of course, the media ran with it, and we were quickly convicted in the court of public opinion.
02:33:27.560We didn't know that's exactly what was happening, but it was confirmed by the DA.
02:33:32.620And the problem for the police was they did a great job of convicting us in the court of public opinion with the assistance of the media, but they couldn't charge us.
02:33:41.280We would have – it had been a bloodbath for them in a court because the evidence was quite contradictory to that as they got into looking at the evidence because they'd made their conclusion early on the day or the day after of John Bonet's murder and then went about, let's find the evidence to prove it.
02:34:01.480Well, the evidence they were finding was contradicted to that conclusion.
02:34:07.280And that became a problem for him because, you know, the media and the public was, you know, screaming, hey, arrest him, you know, charge him.
02:44:25.860A police officer comes in your room, which I assume is the first time in your entire life that a police officer has come in your room with a flashlight looking around, and you still just stay in bed.
02:44:37.260To be fair, I didn't know it was a police officer.
02:45:38.780And just for the listening audience, Burke's answers are all said through what looks like a smile, which is one of the things his critics would react to.
02:48:23.360It was just something JonBenet enjoyed doing.
02:48:25.060And Patsy wanted her to try a lot of different things, which she did.
02:48:29.440But I always thought the people at these little pageants were just moms and grandmoms, and that's quite – there was one indication, of course, we learned later, that, yeah, there was at least one guy there that wasn't there for his daughter based on some questioning that came out and some comments.
02:49:19.480She was sexually assaulted, and that wouldn't have been necessary to hurt me as much as to satisfy this creature's desires.
02:49:38.900So this is why, forgive me, and if you don't want to go here, we don't have to, but this is why when I was reading the autopsy report, and we don't have to get into the details, but the one thing they said, it was unclear to me whether they had semen, whether that was one of the DNAs that they were able to retrieve.
02:49:54.140And there was a suggestion that maybe there was some sort of, you know, they hurt her in some way sexually that didn't involve, you know, a male body part.
02:50:02.460And that's kind of interesting if you think about this being a person whose goal was just to hurt you.
02:57:53.060Now, one journalist that has followed this case almost in the beginning has that information, and I need to get that from her, but I don't know exactly what it is.
02:58:03.880She said there's five or six items that have never been tested.
02:58:07.440And the police keep referring back to, well, it's just a minute amount of DNA.
02:58:38.960Yes. I know. And you're on a push to have the governor remove this case from the Boulder PD and let these sophisticated DNA labs have access to this as opposed to relying on the same cops and detectives that have blown it thus far.
02:58:54.500There are really sophisticated DNA labs. Do you have confidence that if they had access to this box, for lack of a better descriptor, they could make whatever progress is possible, they could make it?
02:59:06.520And that's really all we're asking the governor to do is push the case either out of the boulder hands or require them to take this evidence to be tested by one of the one or two really cutting edge labs in this country and see what we get.
02:59:26.960If we can get some more good DNA evidence, then you take that evidence and put it in the public database and see what you come up with.
02:59:36.520This has been done in the last few years with remarkable success.
02:59:43.360And really what got me, had me, in my mind, take the gloves off with the police is we had spent some time with the regional FBI folks there in Denver and got a relationship where we said, look, this is what needs to happen.
02:59:59.820And in fact, they're the ones that said, look, the government does not have the latest DNA technology.
03:00:05.920We'll get it eventually, but we don't have it.
03:02:44.300The COVID system that the FBI uses, the federal database of criminals or arrested felons,
03:02:51.000It's fairly small, and the states can contribute or not to that database.
03:02:57.760It takes nine markers out of 15 to be accepted in the database, but it's people that have already been found criminal or at least arrested for felonies, and it depends on the state what that rule is.
03:03:15.040But it's not a very big database. And what the public database of the 23andMe, both Jan and I submitted our $35 at our Ancestry to that database.
03:03:31.040They find a reasonably close match or something the least of interest, and they do almost a backwards family tree.
03:03:45.720And then they find out, hey, here's a relative that lived in Boulder in December 1996, and then they start looking at that guy or that person and get his DNA.
03:03:59.600And these remarkable success solutions to these old, old cases have been using that technique.
03:04:06.920And most of these people were not on anybody's radar.
03:04:11.460They weren't in the COVID or the federal database.
03:04:18.580And in fact, the Golden State Killer, which was, I think, the first one found this way, was a 40-year-old case.
03:08:10.100One of the things Lou Smith suggested was that there was that window broken in the basement.
03:08:16.340Saw there was a scuff mark below the window.
03:08:18.060There was a suitcase there, which we talked about briefly, that wasn't normally there.
03:08:23.020And in it, they found a duvet, a Dr. Seuss book, and fibers of the outfit JonBenet was wearing that night, indicating perhaps the murderer might have tried to kidnap her or remove her from the scene in the suitcase, but it was too big.
03:08:39.980But that would explain quite a bit about the crime scene if only we had a talented investigator devoted to following up on these leads.
03:08:48.360The point is the governor must get involved.
03:08:50.900The governor must remove this case from the Boulder PD.
03:08:53.460They must get the fibers and the DNA that is available to a qualified lab and start working with the family instead of against them after all these years.
03:09:00.800In the time we have left, how do you do it?
03:09:05.080Because I know you said you've forgiven whoever did this to JonBenet.
03:09:10.340And, Jon, it just seems like a mountain too high.