Born on July 9, 1987, Amanda Knox is the oldest child of Edda Mellas, an elementary school math teacher originally from Germany, and Curt Knox, a finance executive. Edda and Curt had a second daughter together, Deanna, before divorcing in 1989 when Knox was a toddler, according to The Seattle Times.
Knox grew up with her mother and Deanna in a middle-class neighborhood in West Seattle. (She also has two younger half-sisters, Ashley and Delaney.) She earned a scholarship to attend Seattle Preparatory School, where she performed in school plays and excelled at soccer, according to Vanity Fair.
It was on the soccer field as a child that Knox was given the now-infamous nickname “Foxy Knoxy” because she was quick like a fox. After graduating from Seattle Prep in 2005, Knox attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where she studied creative writing, German and Italian, according to The Guardian.
While a college student, Knox worked three jobs to save $10,000 to study abroad in Perugia, Italy, during her junior year, as her parents told The Seattle Times.
Meredith Kercher was a 21-year-old British exchange student who shared a ground-floor, four-bedroom apartment in Perugia with a then-20-year-old Knox and two Italian women, Filomena Romanelli and Laura Mezzetti.
While Kercher attended the University of Leeds, Knox studied Italian at the University for Foreigners and held a part-time job at a bar called Le Chic. Amid her studies and work, Knox began dating a 23-year-old Italian man named Raffaele Sollecito.
On Nov. 2, 2007, after spending the night with Sollecito, Knox claimed she returned to the apartment to find the door slightly ajar, drops of blood in her bathroom, feces in the toilet and Kercher’s door locked. She made a call to Kercher’s phone, which went unanswered, and to her mother back in Seattle.
“She said, ‘Mom, I’m okay, I’m home, but I think somebody might have been in my house,’ ” Mellas told The Seattle Times.
According to Knox’s account of the morning, she then took a shower and returned to Sollecito’s home. The two came back to the apartment together and attempted to open Kercher’s door. When they couldn’t gain entry, Sollecito called the Italian military police.
Officers quickly arrived, but not the ones Sollecito had called — two postal police had found two phones in a nearby garden and traced them to the home.
When the postal police, who handle communications-related crimes, refused to knock down the door, a friend of Romanelli’s kicked down Kercher’s door, according to Rolling Stone. They found Kercher dead, her throat slashed and her partially clothed body covered by a duvet.
What was Amanda Knox accused of?
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