Steve Moore says he knows how to read evidence and he should. After all he spent 25 years as an FBI agent analyzing evidence to put bad guys behind bars.
Moore now retired from law enforcement and one of Pepperdine’s deputy directors of Public Safety drew upon his experience as a federal investigator to call media attention to his recent findings: that American college student Amanda Knox couldn’t possibly have committed the murder for which she was sentenced to 26 years in Italian prison.
“From the evidence it is impossible that this girl was involved. It’s not even a possibility said Moore of the controversial case that brought on heated international media attention.
Moore was seen on NBC’s Today” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” last week spreading the word that in his opinion Knox and her Italian then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito had been wrongly convicted.
“I can sound an alarm I can tell people Moore said last week on Today.” “The only thing that is going to free Amanda is good people doing something.”
In 2007 Knox was sharing a flat in Perugia Italy with British student Meredith Kercher. On Nov. 2 police entered the residence to find Kercher’s body bloody and half-naked under a duvet in her bedroom. She had been sexually assaulted her throat slashed.
Four days later police arrested Knox Sollecito and a local bar owner. The bar owner was released due to lack of evidence and police soon arrested Ivory Coast citizen Rudy Hermann Guede in connection with the homicide.
Guede opted for a fast-track trial option was tried convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison during October 2008. The Knox-Sollecito trial continued for another year including a dramatic press-and-courtroom battle ending with their convictions last December.
Guede has since appealed his conviction having it reduced to 16 years and appeals are in progress for Knox who was sentenced to 26 years Sollecito who was sentenced to 25 years and Guede who maintains he was at the home but not involved with the killing.
At the time of the trial Moore sided with the public opinion that seemed to peg Knox and Sollecito as brutal murderers. That changed when Moore’s wife watched a television special about Knox’s incarceration and became convinced of her innocence.
Moore with years of law enforcement experience telling him to be skeptical of perpetrators claiming their innocence tried to explain to his wife why Knox was probably guilty.
“Well prove it she challenged.
And Moore went to work, trying to do just that. He started weeding out the evidence” based on rumor and media speculation just seeking out the facts.
Moore wouldn’t say exactly how he obtained access to the evidence but assured that what he examined was the same data entered into evidence at trial.
“The first couple things I checked— that were the most obvious— were lies Moore said. A mention of Knox purchasing bleach the day after the killing had no factual base, he said.
So Moore kept digging through the evidence, and three red flags convinced him of couple’s innocence: that the knife entered into evidence at trial could not have made the stab wounds on Kercher’s body, that the pictures of the blood-stained apartment only bear evidence of a single perpetrator, and that Knox’s character was inconsistent with the acts she was accused of.
Defense attorneys also stated during the trial that the knife couldn’t have made the fatal wounds, but prosecutors believe a second knife, never recovered, was involved with the slaying.
Moore said that from the photos he saw, had Knox and Sollecito been present at the crime scene, the amount of blood would have surely indicated the presence of two additional people. But in his analysis, the photos just don’t show that Knox or Sollecito were present.
The Italian and British media portrayed Knox as a promiscuous, drug-using party girl, but Moore disagreed. He saw her as the honor student who worked multiple jobs to support her study abroad in Italy and who helped care for her physically disabled neighbor several hours each week.
When Amanda Knox gets out if she needs a roommate I’ll send my daughter over Moore told Good Morning America” last week.
“All my conclusions come from raw evidence rather than anyone’s opinions or spin Moore said. Everything I looked at had been used at trial.”
Moore first posted his findings on injusticeinperugia.org a website dedicated to calling attention to the allegedly wrongful conviction of Knox and Sollecito.
“It’s a big group of people that had figured it out long before me Moore explained.
The Knox family first contacted Moore a couple weeks ago by means of an e-mail, thanking him for his post on injusticeinperugia.org.
For Moore, whose FBI credits include helping take down an al-Qaida cell and getting a confession out of a man accused of shooting up a Los Angeles day care center, this personally driven investigation brings back feelings from his days as an investigator.
He says it’s the same rush, but without the futility. Because when he helped put people behind bars as an FBI agent, he still couldn’t bring back the victims. And he would also be ruining the lives of the perpetrators, too— even if they deserved it.
But this case is different. If he can convince the right people, then Amanda Knox could get to come home.
It would be more satisfying than anything I did in the FBI he said.
Pepperdine’s Florence Program Director Elizabeth Whatley said the reputation of international students as drug- and alcohol-abusing partiers is something that appears regularly in the local press. She said Pepperdine has avoided that stigma.
When Pepperdine imposed regulated entry hours for the student residence in Florence, she said, Pepperdine received nods from the local community for being an institution that cares about its students.”
Whatley said Wednesday that news of Moore’s indictment of the Knox conviction had not reached the local news media in Florence.