Rudy Guede, who was convicted of raping and killing British student Meredith Kercher and who was released from jail early this past week, insinuated Amanda Knox and her ex-lover Raffaelle Sollecito were the ones who “inflict[ed] the stab wounds” in the gruesome 2007 murder. Guede, who spent 13 years in jail for the crime, maintained his innocence in his first post-jail interview with Britain’s The Sun, even as Knox pleaded with him to clear her name. “I know the truth and she knows the truth,” he told the tabloid.
Sollecito and Knox both served four years in jail in connection with Kercher’s murder before being acquitted by Italy’s highest court. Knox, who was Kercher’s roommate at the time of the slaying, has implored Guede to “restore my wrongly damaged reputation.” In a Twitter thread, she asserted, “He has the power to tell the truth, to take responsibility, to stop blaming me for the rape and murder of Meredith Kercher, which a wealth of evidence shows he committed alone.”
Guede, whose fingerprints were found at the crime scene and whose DNA was found on and in Kercher’s body, has blamed Knox before. In a taped interview from his Italian prison in 2016, the Ivory Coast native said, “I am 101 percent certain Amanda Knox was there” when Kercher was killed. But Guede’s story about his supposed innocence has been riddled with inconsistencies over the years and despite Knox’s and Sollecito’s shifting alibis early on, Italian courts ultimately found that any DNA evidence tying the pair to the killing had been contaminated and cleared them both.
ADVERTISEMENT
While Guede apologized to Kercher’s parents for “not doing enough to save Meredith,” the girl’s family said the killer’s early release was upsetting and caught them “off-guard.”
Read it at The Sun
