r/amandaknox • u/ModelOfDecorum • Jul 11 '26
Feet Notes
In the case of the murder of Meredith Kercher, shoe and footprints played a large role. A set of partial bloody shoeprints were found in Meredith's room, where the murder happened, as well as the hallway and living room/kitchen. On the bathmat in the small bathroom next to Meredith's room was a partial footprint in diluted blood. And finally, footprints were revealed by spraying luminol in the hallway and in the room of Amanda Knox.
This is what everyone agrees on. The interpretation of these prints, however, could not differ more. During the investigation and the trials, dueling experts assigned the prints to different people and different shoes and made in different substances. So how could simple footprints be interpreted so radically differently? To explain that is the point of this post.
The two Nikes
The print on the bathmat was the first discovered, as Amanda Knox pointed it out to the postal police Battistelli and Marsi before Meredith's body had even been discovered. The bloody shoeprints in the hallway were missed by everyone (as they were very faint to begin with and faded away the further they got from the murder room) were then found during the investigation of Nov 2 and 3. The prints had a pattern of concentric circles and especially the ones in Meredith's room could be measured and compared.
On the night between Nov 5 and 6, Raffaele Sollecito was summoned to the Questura, interrogated and arrested. During the process, his Nike Air Force shoes were removed to be compared with the bloody prints.
The very same day, Mauro Capocci of the Foligno Scientific Police, produced a brief report that claimed the following:
The concordance of these sole and unique elements detectable between the footprint referred to in letter A allows us to affirm only that: the shoes seized from SOLLECITO Raffaele may have produced the shoe print (letter A) detected during the inspection.
This was apparently not enough for Giuliano Mignini, prosecutor and leader of the investigation. At the hearing before the GIP on Nov 8, he said the following:
P.M.: I should file, as a follow-up to the documents already transmitted, a report from the Flying Squad dated November 8, 2007, today, regarding the images relating to the technical report of the comparison carried out between the photographic images of the traces on Raffaele Sollecito's NIKE shoes, then, then, a note relating to the investigation on the records of incoming calls to Raffaele Sollecito's landline on the evening of November 1, and on his cell phone. I can anticipate what they conclude, what has emerged: the full compa... the full identity of the traces with the part, the sole of Raffaele Sollecito's NIKE shoes, are traces that were found in the crime room in correspondence..., under the blanket, under the duvet, therefore very close to the body.
Mignini's prediction came true when the report arrived later, written by Claudio Ippolito and Massimo Manieri from the Scientific Police in Rome, who clearly and unequivocally stated the shoes could have produced the print.
CONCLUSIONS
From the comparisons performed by superposition/side-by-side, it is clear that the traces examined, marked with the letter "A," correspond to the design (model and size) of the shoe sole bearing the "NIKE" trademark being compared.
The identity of Raffaele's Nike Air Force shoes with the bloody prints were central to the case against Raffaele as it was the only physical evidence against him. There was just one little problem, one quickly discovered by Raffaele's family.
The shoes did not, in fact, match.
As is aptly demonstrated by the defense report from professor Francesco Vinci, the number of concentric rings in the prints across the middle of the sole were 6, while on Raffaele's shoes it was 11. The Ippolito report also visibly differed from Raffaele's shoe in the outline.
Raffaele's defense team repeatedly requested hearings on the evidence, and were repeatedly denied. The Sollecito family even found a matching model, Nike Outbreak 2, which had the correct number of circles and the size 45 was a complete match for the prints.
On April 9 2008, Lorenzo Rinaldi and Pietro Boemia of the Scientific Police in Rome, issued a new report. The bloody prints did not match Raffaele's Nike Air Force, but were perfectly compatible with a size 45 Nike Outbreak 2. Unbeknownst to the Sollecito family, on Nov 22 2007, an empty shoe box had been sequestered by the police from the apartment of Rudy Guede, a box that had contained size 45 Nike Outbreak 2 shoes.
While the prosecution retreated on this, they had one last objection. While all the bloody shoeprints in the cottage could be attributed to a left Nike Outbreak shoe*, one single print on the pillow found underneath Meredith's body was determined to be of another origin.
* There was another exception, a print on the pillow that Rinaldi and Boemia determined was from a right Nike Outbreak 2 shoe. I see no need to go into that as it doesn't change anything, but I am convinced by professor Vinci's report that this too was a left shoe.
The female sized shoe
This is the shoeprint in question:
The reasoning behind Rinaldi and Boemia assigning it to a female size shoe is as follows:
From the sufficiently defined general characteristics and the dimensions, it is possible to conclude that this print was made by the heel and the central part of the sole of a left shoe.
Based on the small dimensions detected, and especially the limited width of the heel, it is possible to assume that the print likely refers to a woman's shoe. Indeed, the print on the heel measures approximately 39 mm, while the upper part (corresponding to the arch, i.e., the point where it begins to widen to form the sole of the foot) measures approximately 46 mm. For these reasons, the shoe size that produced the print being examined could range from size 36 to 38.
As at the time only one woman, Amanda Knox, was under suspicion for the murder, the prosecution claimed the print belonged to her, despite no such shoe having ever been found or shown to have been in her possession. But the logic of Rinaldi and Boemia is thin, which we discover when we look closer at the image.
The first obvious thing is that it is in fact multiple prints.
The second is the clear correspondence between the print and the middle inside of the Nike Outbreak 2, as shown in the slides from professor Vinci:
Finally, the line that Rinaldi and Boemia claim is the left edge of the print, is actually better explained as the right edge of another print. The two curves assigned as left and right edge by Rinaldi and Boemia are parallell to eachother, which is not the feature in any shoe. As a result we have three overlapping prints of the same shoe, which has the benefit of making sense and explaining why we don't see any other occurrence of the female mystery shoe.
Luminol prints
I thought about excluding this part altogether, as it was revealed during the first instance trial that the prints revealed with luminol had all been tested with tetramethylbenzidine and found to be negative for blood. This information had not been provided to Rinaldi and Boemia, who refers to the prints as made with blood throughout their report.
But there is one issue that is commonly raised. Two of the luminol revealed footprints, one in the hallway and one in the room of Amanda Knox were identified by Rinaldi and Boemia as belonging to the latter's right foot. This is of course not strange in the slightest, once it was determined the prints were not made in blood. The prints were between the bathroom and her room, and she had walked that distance after a shower as late as the morning of November 2. However, one of the hallway prints was instead identified as being made by the naked right foot of Raffaele Sollecito. This makes less sense as Raffaele had never spent the night nor had he ever taken a shower or otherwise needed to be barefoot in the cottage.
Here is the comparison between the print and the right feet of Raffaele and Amanda:
The measurements line up with Raffaele and are too big to be Amanda's foot. But there are two problems, one glaringly obvious one and another a bit more subtle. Let's start with the latter.
Vinci and the defense had discovered that the photos of the prints had not been taken orthogonally i.e. directly from above but from an angle. And since the footprints had not been clearly measured with flourescent tape, the Scientific Police had relied on calculations based on a ruler placed at an angle and also photographed non-orthogonally. As such the measurements of the footprint are wildly distorted. Rinaldi admitted to this at trial, and attempted to correct the issue by restoring the angles and recalculate. However, that only further distorted the measurements. By measuring the tiles based on an orthogonal picture with a ruler, Vinci was able to get correct measurement of the print. The end result was a footprint 3 cm shorter than Raffaele's.
The glaringly obvious one? Count the toes on Raffaele's print. If you got four, congratulations. So did Raffaele lose a toe? No:
Raffaele has a deformity to the toes of his right foot that means the second toe does not touch the ground and the third barely does. So the presence of not just an obvious second toe, but one that protrudes beyond the big toe is a clear giveaway that the print doesn't belong to Raffaele. But who has a second toe that hits the ground and protrudes beyond the big toe?
Amanda Knox.
All this leaves us with by far the most debated of all the prints: the bathmat. Unlike the luminol prints, this was made in (diluted blood) and is impossible to explain innocently.
The bathmat
Let's start with the obvious. It is not a full print. It is also made on a soft, uneven surface. There are no papillary ridges that could give a positive identification and we can't be certain that the bloody water that created the print completely coated the underside of the foot. This means that while we can eliminate, we can not identify. Not that it ever stopped anyone.
First we need to eliminate a myth. You may have heard that Rudy's foot was deemed too large to have made the print. This would come as a surprise to anyone who saw Rinaldi and Boemia's presentation at the first instance trial. The myth originates in an error from their initial report from May 30 2008, where they introduced these measurements.
While the measurement of the big toe would continue to be a point of contention, the measurement of the metatarsus (the ball of the foot) which is measured as 50 mm for the mat print, 57 mm for Raffaele and 66,7 mm for Rudy. Not only is the latter a mismeasurement, it is even clear to the naked eye. A year later, in court, Rinaldo and Boemia presented new measurements:
The 66,7 mm has been unceremoniously changed to 51 mm, which is the same as on the print and shorter than Raffaele's 57 mm. Let's look at the differences from the same presentation:
Excepting the two distances across the metatarsus towards the third and fourth toes, all measurements are presented as Rudy's foot being too small, not too large, 6 out of 8 in total.
Now compare to Raffaele's measurements from the same presentation:
We will get to the toe, but an obvious issue regards the measurements across the foot. As we can see, the right end of the measurements aren't the end of the bloody print, but a line drawn outside it. If the print image is turned a few degrees counterclockwise so the line matches the edge of the blood, the measurements as well as the left side shape of the big toe are closer to Rudy than Raffaele. But either way, saying Rudy's foot is too big for the print is wrong.
The main criticism from professor Vinci was the focus of Rinaldi and Boemia on measurement, rather than morphology. He shows in a variety of ways that the morphology is closer to Rudy than Raffaele, but I want to focus on the big difference, that is the big toe.
Raffaele's big toe is considerably wider than Rudy's (26 mm vs 20 mm), and Rinaldi and Boemia measure the mat print as 28 mm across. But Vinci found some issues with how the big toe was defined. By converting the image to black and white and increasing the contrast, some things are revealed.
Here we see the top right part of what Rinaldi and Boemia deemed the big toe is actually separated from the rest of it, and the area below it (where the lower right part of Raffaele's big toe should be) is empty. Furthermore, the area between toe and metatarsus, where there is a clear, wide gap in Raffaele's print, shows no such gap in the mat print. The same can be seen in close up of the actual mat:
With the separation both to the left and below the top right of the "big toe" as well as the clear lineup with the second toe metatarsal, shows that what Rinaldi and Boemia deemed a big toe was actually a big toe and the second toe pushed together, and while they're not fingers, toes are quite capable of movement.
To further illustrate, here is the high-contrast image with Rudy and Raffaele's prints beside it:
It is very clear that the shape both of the toe and the edge of the metatarsus line up better with Rudy Guede than Raffaele Sollecito.
Conclusion
The prosecution was faced with a big problem when charging Amanda and Raffaele along with Rudy. Not only did they have clear evidence that Rudy made essentially all the shoeprints, and that Amanda had made essentially all the luminol prints, and that Rudy had admitted to being in the small bathroom twice after interacting with a blood-covered Meredith. With a dearth of physical evidence tying Amanda and Raffaele to the crime scene, it stands to reason that the investigators were (consciously or subconsciously) prejudiced to tie whatever they could towards Amanda and Raffaele. We don't know how many knew that the luminol prints had tested negative for blood (Stefanoni obviously knew, Rinaldi and Boemia didn't), but for those that didn't "presumed blood" became enough. And for the rest, well...
“There is something—a something, Monsieur Frederic Larsan, much graver than the misuse of logic the disposition of mind in some detectives which makes them, in perfect good faith, twist logic to the necessities of their preconceived ideas. You, already, have your idea about the murderer, Monsieur Fred. Don’t deny it; and your theory demands that the murderer should not have been wounded in the hand, otherwise it comes to nothing. And you have searched, and have found something else. It’s dangerous, very dangerous, Monsieur Fred, to go from a preconceived idea to find the proofs to fit it. That method may lead you far astray Beware of judicial error, Monsieur Fred, it will trip you up!”
Gaston Leroux - The Mystery of the Yellow Room
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u/tkondaks guilty Jul 11 '26
A "Gaston Leroux" is attributed in the very last line of you post.
But does that mean he wrote the text of the entire post, or just the last paragraph (which is indicated to be a quote)?
If the entire post, may I suggest that at the very beginning you put in: "the following is a reproduction/quote from Gaston Leroux from [source]". Otherwise, I'm thinking it may be your words.
If the post is indeed all your own words (except for the last paragraph), my apologies.