3 August 2009

Dear Simon Hattenstone,

Hello, I have to say I'm a bit nervous about writing this letter because I'm not sure what I think about journalists and journalism any more. My entire life I've looked up to the profession quite a bit, even considered it as a profession to look into myself, until all that was thrown completely out of whack and I was left feeling really shocked, lost, betrayed and really angry.

That was the first thing Amanda Knox wrote to me, four years ago. I had interviewed Amanda Knox's mother Edda Mellas a few months earlier, and sent a copy of the article to Knox at the Perugia prison where she had been held in custody for nearly two years, charged alongside her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito with the murder of popular 21-year-old student Meredith Kercher. Knox believed the press had demonised her. Prosecution lawyers were about to go further.

In the subsequent court case, lead prosecutor Giuliano Mignini argued that Knox and Sollecito, alongside Rudy Guede (who had already been convicted of murder and sexual assault) had killed Kercher after a sex game had gone wrong. At the trial, Knox was described as a sex-obsessed witch, a she-devil who hated women, and who had cajoled her boyfriend of six days into murdering her former housemate.

The letter spooked me. Knox said she liked Guardian Weekend. "The article about internet dating was both funny and slightly disturbing," she wrote. "An important article considering how many vulnerable people could get taken advantage of by sexual and emotional predators. The fashion section shows three out of four outfits I would LOVE to wear (the second is a bit too 'office-building' for me) and 'the new vegetarian' recipe pieces looked really good." How could someone facing a murder charge be so glib? The newspapers had reported that Knox spent her time in jail strumming her guitar and singing Beatles songs. Sure enough, she concluded: "Here comes the sun! Let it be! Be well, Simon. I'm in your hands, Amanda." Next to this she had drawn an outline of her hands. Was she playing with me?

Yet there was something solemn, too. "I want to thank you as personally as I can for the honest act of journalism you have done for my mother and me. I see you really worked hard to give my mom her voice about all this, since your article sounds like being visited by her here in prison when we feel compelled to exchange our feelings in regard to this crazy mess."

The letter's openness, and its surprising shifts in tone, reminded me of something her mother had said when we met. I had asked if she had always believed in her daughter's innocence. Yes, she said, and gave me the standard defence argument: lack of DNA evidence, no motive, no history of crime or violence. But it was the next thing she said that stuck with me. "I'll tell you a little story about Amanda. Amanda doesn't know how to lie. If you were to ask her, 'What d'you think of my shoes?' and she thought they were hideous, she doesn't do the polite thing. She'll tell you they're hideous. Since she was five, she'd do that. Some of those interesting social things most people do, she doesn't."

The main evidence against Amanda Knox came from Knox herself. In November 2007, towards the end of a four-day interrogation by Italian police, she confessed to having been at the scene of the murder, and to covering her ears to drown out Kercher's screams. She named Patrick Lumumba, her boss at a local bar, as the killer. Case closed. Only, within hours, Knox had withdrawn her confession; she said she had been bullied and threatened until she no longer knew what she was saying. In her first retraction, she said she was fairly sure she had falsely confessed to attending a murder she knew nothing about. By the second retraction, the following day, she said she knew she had made a false confession. Sure enough, Lumumba produced a reliable alibi.

Tabloid reporters were sent to Seattle, Knox's home town, where anonymous friends described her as a drug fiend, a party animal, an out-of-control man-eater. Her Facebook page was analysed, her photographs, her comments. The kiss she and Sollecito shared on the day of Kercher's death became evidence against her, as did the pink, rabbit-shaped vibrator she had brought to Perugia. The cartwheel she turned in the police station became a whoop of insouciant joy. Even her eyes militated against her: too icy-blue to be innocent.

And, guilty or not, Knox made a series of terrible decisions – from her false confession, to implicating an innocent man, to failing to attend a vigil for Kercher. She had smoked pot on the night of the murder, which did nothing to clarify her memory, lied to the police about the pot to protect her housemates, agreed to be interviewed for four days by police in a language she was just beginning to get to grips with, and without a lawyer. She said she had returned home from Sollecito's house, seen drops of blood in the bathroom and still showered. It was only when she saw faeces in the toilet shared by the two other girls in the flat that she panicked. She called her mother, who told her to go straight back to Sollecito's house and call the police.

There wasn't a thing about Amanda Knox that worked in her favour, not even her nickname. It didn't matter that she became Foxy Knoxy at the age of 13, because of her skill on the football pitch; Foxy Knoxy now meant only one thing: a girl who was so vain she was likely to kill another girl who might be seen as a rival.

In December 2009, two years after Kercher was killed, Knox and Sollecito were convicted of her murder. (Knox was given an additional three-year sentence for slandering Lumumba.) The bedroom in which Kercher died had been full of Guede's DNA. None was found for Knox and Sollecito, though the prosecution found that a knife in Sollecito's apartment had a trace of Knox's DNA mixed with Kercher's; Sollecito's DNA was detected on a clasp torn from Kercher's bra.

Rudy Guede at his appeal in Perugia. Photograph: Franco Origlia/Getty Images

After Kercher's murder, Guede had fled to Germany, where he was Skyped by a friend under police observation. Had Knox been involved in the murder, the friend asked. No, Guede said. Sollecito? Guede didn't know who Sollecito was. It was only after he had been arrested some weeks later, amid widespread coverage of the arrests of Knox and Sollecito, that Guede named them. He claimed to have had consensual sex with Kercher, gone to the toilet and returned to find Knox and Sollecito killing Meredith. The jury did not believe him and he was sentenced to 30 years – reduced to 16 years after he named Knox and Sollecito. Guede could now be released in a couple of years.

After Knox was convicted, we continued to correspond. She never answered questions about the crime, which frustrated me, but made sense: her letters were likely to be opened by prison authorities. She would thank me for magazines or books, and took an interest in what my children were doing. My older daughter is four years younger than Knox, and Knox would occasionally offer advice. She seemed to crave normality: sometimes, I sensed her living vicariously through my talk of school trips, homework and friendships. She wrote about all the positives of prison: her friendship with the chaplain, jogging around the yard, playing guitar in the church choir, letters from her friend Madison. Sometimes she would sound terrified and broken. More than anything, she sounded desperately young.

17 December 2009

Dear Simon,

I've been kind of up and down emotionally lately. Sometimes I feel really scared by how big and absurd this all is, and how vulnerable and impotent I feel next to it all. Today I was writing to my old friend Madison, trying to describe how much I really wanted to hold her hand, and I felt OK, I felt good, I felt sure that somehow this is going to turn out all right. I don't know, of course, but I guess I just really do believe that I'll go home. I don't know if that's just me being weird, but that's what I was thinking today.

Peace, Amanda

Over time, the letters changed from regulation prison stock to prettier paper, often illustrated with butterflies or birds. The symbols seemed more in hope than expectation.

20 May 2010

Sometimes, when I feel really alone and sad, I wonder if I've died inside, and when I get out will I be able to be anything other than a zombie, lost and brainless, just a husk. That's when I feel really sad and it's what I fear most. What I'm hoping for, looking forward to really, is when I look back on this experience from a safe distance and reflect. For the moment I have to remember that the present, no matter what it is, is now, and I'm only living if I make the most out of it.

Well, I'm off for today. Off to my "singing class". Be well, Simon.

Over the following months, her appeal progressed through the Italian courts, and in October 2011 her and Sollecito's convictions were overturned. An independent review disputed the DNA findings, raising concerns over poor procedures during evidence collection and forensic testing, and pointing to possible contamination.

We continued to correspond; now that Knox was back in Seattle, she could email. She was getting her life back together; she had returned to the University of Washington to complete her creative-writing course, she had a new boyfriend, James, and she was working on a book. There was an outcry when it was reported that she had received a £2.8m advance. I asked if the book would make her rich. No, she said. The family were in huge debt because of lawyers' bills; they had had to remortgage the family house, and even with the advance she might not have sufficient funds to get through college.

Knox during her original trial in 2008. Photograph: Rex Features

But as the book's publication date drew near, in March 2012, the Italian supreme court ordered a retrial. By the time she appeared on Diane Sawyer's US chatshow for a promotional interview, Knox had gone from the exonerated to the accused.

On April 3 2013, she emailed about the retrial:

It was really distressing and incomprehensible news, but I've lurched myself over the emotional hump and now I'm just trying to think of what's the best, most intelligent way to move forward and confront this. I also ultimately think things will turn out OK. It just sucks that it will take so long.

I'm working on getting tougher with self-defence classes. Mostly, I'm trying to get over my deer-in-headlights instinct, when I freeze when confronted with scary situations. Is it more correct to call it the dead-possum instinct?

I've been thinking about a job. I mean, I was working and attending the university of Washington before I left for Italy, and I need to think about the financial hurdles I'll need to overcome, what with further legal battles and needing to finish paying back my parents.

To be quite honest, the joyful relief of the publication of my book was short-lived. Without those responsibilities to think about any more, I'm anxiously awaiting news about my further trial and I'm a bit at a loss of what to think about it or do about it. I wasn't expecting to have to defend myself all over again and it's incredibly disconcerting.

She had been thinking about her recent television interview, and was not entirely satisfied with it.

I always come out of those things thinking I could have said something better, more concisely. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't the fact that I'm being judged on every word and facial expression. Bleh.

She was still convinced she would be acquitted again. This time, the prosecution was arguing a different motive, not a sex game gone wrong but a violent argument about hygiene. Kercher had complained about an unflushed toilet, they said, and Knox, Sollecito and Guede had killed her. We agreed to meet for the first time, in the week before the verdict.

Knox suggests we meet in a cafe close to her home in Seattle. After almost five years of correspondence, I'm still not sure what to expect – the confident breakfast show guest, or the confused hippy-geek who has been writing to me.

Much has been made of Knox's Seattle-based agent David Marriott, hired by the family to deal with the media. But in all the years we have corresponded, I have never heard from Marriott. She arrives a few minutes late, a short, slight young woman in trousers and flats. She wears a beret and John Lennon specs, no make-up; her skin is blotchy. She looks like a cross between Harry Potter and Little Red Riding Hood's granny. Her voice is rich and confident. We shake hands and half-hug, clumsily.

She likes bringing people here, she says. "There's a good traffic of people, but it's still very private." She is proud of her home city: she talks about its musical legacy, its world-famous fish market. Her rain boots are blue and green, the colour of her local football team, the Seahawks, who go on to win the Superbowl days later.

She cups a latte and talks about university, living with her boyfriend James, making new friends. So you're just a regular student, I say. She gulps. "To have a Hunger Games moment with you, at a certain point the main character is talking about how he doesn't want the games to change him. He's a pawn, and he's just in it, and it's overwhelming his life, but he doesn't want it to define who he is. And I felt like that. I don't want this to be my life." But the reality, she admits, is somewhat different.

So, for example, there is always a moment with potential new friends when she has to come clean. "If I'm interacting with somebody and they don't recognise me immediately, they'll ask questions like, 'Hey, so what major are you?' 'Oh I'm a creative writing major.' 'Are you a senior? A freshman?' 'Oh, I'm a senior?' 'How old are you? 'Oh, I'm 26. And they're like 'Oh wow, what have you been doing to take so long?' and I'm like, 'Oh, well, I was studying abroad.' 'Really, where were you studying abroad?' 'Oh, in Italy.' 'Oh wow, that must have been awesome.' I'm like, 'O-aaaaah.' And they're like 'Oh why, explain?' And I'm like, 'I was in prison.'"

And then? "'They do the oh-my-God face, and I'm like, it's totally cool, don't feel weird about it. I do a very short explanation – I was in prison for something I didn't do, but now I'm out." She tells the story well, segueing between the two voices.

She talks about the way the media has shaped her character from individual, decontextualised images. "Some people have made claims that I am histrionic or autistic, because it might explain strange behaviour. I think people have exaggerated how strangely I reacted. I was not concerned with what people were thinking. I was not thinking, 'Oh, I'd better sit still.' If I felt like getting up and pacing because I was thinking, 'How horrible and oh my God', I wasn't remotely concerned with how people were looking at me. Now I take it more into consideration, because I've had people dissect everything I do in a way that makes me pause.'"

The now infamous shot of Knox and Rafaelle Sollecito on the day after the murder. Photograph: Gavin Rodgers/Pixel

I ask how she thinks the kiss she shared with Sollecito outside the house on the morning after Kercher's murder was interpreted. "There was me and Raffaele conspiratorially celebrating our triumph over the situation. They made it sound like I had no feeling whatsoever for what was happening in the house. She's just sitting there making out with her boyfriend because she's so sex-crazed. I was actually sitting there devastated and traumatised and shocked." She points an accusing finger at me. "You guys were filming there all morning and you have a five-second clip. That is supposed to define those hours. Or, every time I was walking through the courtroom, they loved to project the shot where I'm looking that way [she shifts her eyes from right to left], because it looks sinister."

She has always said there was only one set of people she smiled for: her family. "I didn't want them to see me scared. I wanted them to know I'm OK, because they can't do anything about it. They don't speak Italian, they're just sitting there worrying about me, looking at the back of my head, because I can't even turn around throughout the entire hearing. It's about interacting with the people you care about to see if you can make them feel better. That was turned into, 'Amanda makes the catwalk across the court room because she loves all the attention.' I never made eye contact with those journalists. They were just a bunch of lenses yelling out or making comments about what I looked like."

Is she seeing a therapist? "No, I've tried twice. It feels self-indulgent. It feels like I should be able to do it on my own, which is not true, because everybody needs help." Over the days, I discover this is a recurring theme for Knox: a concern not to look weak, to keep control of her emotions.

Is she taking antidepressants? "Noooooah," she says. "I'm very anti antidepressants. It's not the chemicals of my brain that's a problem, it's reality. I don't think tricking my brain into reinterpreting reality is going to help." Does she associate antidepressants with prison sedation? "Exactly. I found it incredibly uncomfortable that they did that in prison. That was their problem-solving technique for people reacting strongly against the unnaturalness of prison; get them to shut up and drift through that time and lose it, so they don't even have any memory of it. Rehabilitation is a joke." She refused all medical treatment in prison.

Does she still smoke pot, or did the prosecution's argument that cannabis had confused her and Sollecito put her off? "Yes, it put me off. The only thing I rely on is caffeine. I was not a pot head in the way that people thought, and I definitely wasn't an out-of-control murderer because of pot." She mentions the fact that a "super witness" who claimed to have seen her and Sollecito by the house in the middle of the night was a heroin addict, and yet he was still regarded as reliable. "Heroin's not a big deal when it's for a witness, but pot is a big deal when it's the suspect. Pot turns two kids who have never had any history of violence or aggression or antisocial behaviour into psychotic sex predators," she says bitterly. "Like that's convenient."

I ask how prison has changed her, and she doesn't know where to begin. She smiles. "Like, I'm no longer watching movies and going, 'Oh I love that girl's boots – I'm going to wear those boots because I'm going to be like her.'" At times you forget how young Knox was when she was jailed. The whole family have been hugely affected, she says. "Mum can't focus, can't read. She used to love reading. My younger sister Deanna has grown up – she's like the older sister now. And my dad has been greatly affected. I think he is much sadder. We're all angry."

Who's angriest? "I think me. My mom doesn't want to be angry. Chris, my stepdad, has always been, 'Darn people, duh!' I used to be so much more laidback about things. I will get upset when I hear on the radio about somebody who had to go through something horrible, it gets my heart racing. I'm much more antisocial. I feel uncomfortable in places where there are crowds. I felt I was part of something and now I feel so much less so. I project an intensity that makes family members uncomfortable."

Do they tell you? "Yeah!" What do they say? She smiles. "You're being intense. And I'm like, sorry. My family is very close-knit and I tended to be the one to joke around and calm the waters."

Since returning home, Knox says she has received death threats. What form have they taken? "They were sent to me or my family members. And I had someone following me. A lot of it was just through the internet. Some would say, I know where you live, or you deserve to go to hell. I don't know how many pictures I have where they Photoshop me in flames."

Meredith Kercher on her 21st birthday. Photograph: PA

She gets frustrated when people tell her nobody will ever know what happened, that it's too complicated. "I think it's very clear I'm innocent. It's literally impossible for me to have committed the crime with the evidence they have." What makes it impossible? "Meredith was my friend, and I would never have done anything like that. No history of crime. And there is no trace of me in that room. You cannot commit a murder and have all the evidence of the person who did it there, all the blood, and that not be me and then say I was the one who plunged the knife. So everything about it, the circumstantial bullcrap, is irrelevant, it is impossible. And the prosecution has never been able to account for the fact that there is no trace of me." Now she does sound angry.

She has been in touch with Sollecito throughout the retrial. She says he is terrified and vulnerable. Does it still feel that they are jointly charged, even though she is here in Seattle? "We're in this together, because we were with each other. The unfortunate thing is people disregard him. It was a very important point that his lawyers brought up in their closing arguments. They said, stop just making him an addendum to me, he's his own person and you can't just decide he's guilty because you want her."

The next day, she calls and suggests we meet at her apartment, with her close friend Madison Paxton. I ring the bell and it takes an eternity for her to come down. It's only when I'm climbing staircase after staircase that I realise why. The cramped apartment she shares with her boyfriend James, who teaches classical guitar, is at the top: a bedroom, a study and a kitchen, all tiny. Knox lived here with Madison before she left for Italy. The study walls are lined with books and DVDs: Shakespeare in English, Italian and German, the great philosophers, Harry Potter, V For Vendetta, Roberto Benigni movies. The kitchen is taken up with a small table and an old cooker. On one wall, there is a vintage poster of a menacing police officer with a bubble coming out of his mouth, saying he knows what a guilty man looks like. Knox spends 10 minutes offering me teas, making me smell peppermint, rose-caramel, crimson quartet.

We sit in the late afternoon sun, chatting about their early exchanges when Knox went off to Perugia. Paxton says she made everything sound so perfect, it was infuriating. "She was just listing everything she loved. I don't know if you remember this. It was like, I love this, I love this, I love this."

Knox laughs at the memory.

"Then she gets this amazing house, and these amazing room mates and it's all wonderful. Every time I got an email, I rolled my eyeballs. It was just hilariously predictable, seeing goodness here, and great things there, and kind people here."

A huge smile lights up Knox's face at one memory. "I have a terrace where I sunbathe! We had a little porch thing that was wonderful because it faced into the valley. It was something me and Meredith did. We'd sunbathe on the terrace. I can sunbathe and it's October! How crazy."

Paxton remembers the day Knox was arrested. Knox had sent her a brief email saying Meredith had been killed, and then she didn't hear from her. She heard a rumour that Knox had been arrested. "I didn't go to our next class, and I called Brett, a good friend of ours, and asked are you at a computer right now? Google Amanda. Please tell me there is no indication that she's arrested. And I remember, a few seconds later, Brett going, yep, that is a photo of Amanda in handcufffs, and I'm going, Brett, why are you doing this? He jokes quite a lot." He wasn't joking.

Has Paxton ever believed Knox was guilty? "I have an awareness that you can never completely know someone, but I can't think of a gentler person. Therefore either she is the most amazingly manipulative person with the weirdest long-term plan. Or, way more likely, a scenario of irresponsible interrogation, and a textbook example of wrongful imprisonment. If you gave me a reason to think she might be guilty, I would consider it, but they never gave one."

Paxton didn't see her friend for close on two years, until she testified as a character witness at Knox's trial. "I wore this thing she crocheted. I made a gesture. And I'm wearing a yellow shirt, and you like yellow. So, recognise," she says looking at Knox.

Knox smiles and puts two fingers up to her eyes. "Recognised."

By the time they were allowed to talk to each other, Knox was a convicted murderer. Can they remember the first time they spoke?

Paxton: "I think the first time was the eyelash..."

Knox: "We've always been very physical and touchy. I give back massages, she gives me a head massage. She reached across to me because I had an eyelash on my face, and I twitched because I was not used to being touched unless I was being stripped down. So she was like, calm down, baby, it's OK."

Paxton: "It was just startling and sad."

Paxton decided to move to Perugia, to study at the university and support her friend. When she visited Knox in prison, she told herself she had two goals: to re-educate Knox in the ways of friendship (she braided her hair, chatted about their future) and to make her realise that she wasn't crazy for having made a false confession. "I was trying to help her understand that what happened to her is just textbook. So it was like, hey, do you know 25% of people who are exonerated confess, and 79% of exonerated murderers made a false confession?"

Knox corrects her. "No, it's 62% of exonerated murderers who falsely confess. It makes a huge difference to me when I think I'm the only person in the world."

Knox in Seattle with her friend Madison Paxton. Photograph: Patrick Kehoe for the Guardian

The light is fading, and we move from the kitchen table to the bedroom. Knox introduces me to the framed photographs on the wall. "This is me and my mom and my little sister when we were participating in the Seafarer Clown Parade and I was doing gymnastics down the street. And this is James doing what he does [playing guitar]. And this is my dad with me and my little sister Deanna on his lap, looking very happy about being a dad."

I ask Knox how it is possible to go from knowing exactly what you did with your boyfriend one night to confessing to being at the scene of a murder and implicating an innocent man? She starts to explain, quietly and methodically. "They said you need to remember, and if you don't remember we're going to put you in prison. I felt it was my fault I was confused – they made it seem like it was my fault, that there was something wrong with me. If you can't remember what you did between 7pm and 8pm, and 8pm and 9pm, there's something wrong with you and you're lying. Then they told me Raffaele said I wasn't there [at his house], and that completely threw me off – which also wasn't true. And now we have this cellphone message. Try to think… Try to think… Who is this Patrick you sent this message to? You left, you left, it says so on this message. I was just sitting there so long trying to think what I couldn't remember, and them yelling at me and saying if I didn't remember, I'd go to prison for 30 years, and I was protecting the killer."

I don't know if she's aware that she is re-enacting this breakdown in front of me, but it's one of the most painful things I have witnessed. "When I named Patrick, I just started weeping. I thought, Oh my God, it must be true what they're saying. I must have witnessed my friend's murder somehow, and now I'm traumatised enough to not even remember it. And to be drawn into this horrible idea of what happened was so completely overwhelming that I just wept for I don't know how long. I was delirious."

She comes to a teary stop. "When I say I was a kid when it happened, it is because I was a kid. I was not ready for that. I wanted my mom." There is another long pause. "Then you get into a place where my mom can't help me. I'm in a place where no one can help me. And that's where I spent four years."

Did she blame herself? "Yes, absolutely. I thought I was weak and therefore deserved it." You sense that however sure Knox is of her innocence, and however much she may have been bullied into a confession, she will never forgive herself for implicating an innocent man. Has she ever apologised to Lumumba? "I said something in court, but I've also really struggled with what happened with Patrick." She says his legal team have said unacceptable things about her in court. "His lawyer called me a demon, a two-faced Judas, a racist, a liar, strega... witch. A wolf in sheep's clothing."

But surely she can understand why Lumumba hates her? "Yes, Patrick was greatly hurt by what happened and he never got answers from me. Granted, I was in a position where I couldn't give answers. But if you read what I said after my interrogations, I said I could not testify against him, and yet his lawyer continues to say I was going to let him languish in prison. And the police kept him when he had an alibi, so his anger is misdirected."

She says the thing she wants most is to convince the Kerchers that she was not responsible for Meredith's death. I ask if she can see how tough that would be for them, when she confessed to witnessing it. "It's one of the things I find very hard to live with. I understand why it's so difficult for them to consider that I'm innocent. That's a really big rock to overturn. I just keep hoping that, with enough information, they're going to come to this conclusion. When I think about Meredith, and how our fates became so intertwined, how our fates could have been swapped at any moment, it's just circumstances that led to it being the way it is. I see her family and think about my own family. Everybody loved Meredith. Even if all this hadn't happened I'd still be traumatised by her death. But at least I'm alive. Imagine how they feel." (The Kerchers did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

It is now dark outside, and Knox is exhausted. She barely has the energy to see me out. The next day, I get an email from her: "Is it OK if we don't meet today – I've got to get on with my homework." She had warned me she would retreat as the week progressed, and I'm not really expecting to see her again. She emails the following day, too. "I'm feeling increasingly under a lot of stress and I'm doing my best to try to cope and continue to make responsible decisions under the circumstances (as far as my work, school work, media considerations, family considerations, et al). I hate to leave you hanging, but I think I will have to see how I feel tomorrow. Not to be melodramatic, but I spent a lot of time crying today, and I'm feeling really drained and overwhelmed." One day before the verdict, she texts: "Do you think you're up to stopping by? There's a complication: tons of paparazzi outside my mom's house."

I get a cab over to her mother's house. Paxton answers the door. Knox's stepfather Chris is knocking up a beef salad with gherkins, her younger sister Deanna is off to work with a heavy cold, the dogs Pinky and Cinder are slobbering around the lounge looking for love. The back garden is full of footballs, but Knox is in no mood to show off her skills. Knox has a few friends round, including Ryan Ferguson, a 29-year-old whose convictions for murder and robbery were overturned two months ago after he spent 10 years in a maximum-security jail. The mood is quietly social, but tense.

Every few minutes, Chris or Madison or Deanna go to the front window to see what the paparazzi are up to.

"Look," Chris says, "if you want to punch a wall, punch a wall. If you want to shout, shout. That's what we're here for. We're your family."

"But it's so self-indulgent," Knox replies. "I've just got to control myself."

Chris gives Paxton a despairing look.

"If you can't tell us how you're feeling, who can you tell?" Paxton says.

They are preparing for a long night ahead. The verdict is due as early as 6am Seattle time, and you can't imagine anybody sleeping much tonight. Dawn comes and goes, then breakfast time. Knox is watching the courtroom scene on a live stream at home. I email to ask how she is coping. She replies: "My heart's beating very hard, but it's much better to be waiting for a verdict with my family than in a cell."

An hour later, the judge returns to the courtroom. The original verdict is reinstated: Sollecito and Knox are declared guilty, and sentenced to 25 years and 28 and a half years respectively. Speaking to news crews, Meredith Kercher's brother Lyle says: "It's hard to feel anything at the moment, because we know it will go to a further appeal. No matter what the verdict was, it never was going to be a case of celebrating anything." The Kercher family lawyer, Francesco Maresca, describes the verdict as "justice for Meredith and the family".

It is Monday, 3 February, four days after the verdict. Knox has flown to New York and back for a television interview, and is in class when I call. She says her friends have been supportive, and she feels secure in an academic environment. Her stepfather has told her she needs to grow a pair of cojones, and that's what she's going to do. She has spoken to Sollecito, and says he is struggling. "You can hear it in his voice. This is a devastating blow for both of us, and he's right in the middle of it."

What impact will the reconviction have on her life? "Oh God, it has a practical impact on my wellbeing and psychology on a very fundamental level. I feel stranded. Granted, I feel so much safer here in the US, where people still believe in me, but when I talked to you about feeling marked – being marked as an exoneree is one thing and being marked as a criminal is another. It hurts. It's not OK. People have been quiet and respectful, but it's like I've just been diagnosed with cancer. There's nowhere I can go where there's not this knowledge that I'm this girl who is convicted again. I'm never going to be OK with the idea that somebody can quote some judge's decision and say I'm a convicted murderer."

She says she's still processing what it all means. "Everyone is telling me to go on with life and it's going to work itself out, but I don't know what that means and I don't know what I can hold on to. This is damaging all of us. I am referring back in my mind to that feeling of being imprisoned, and remembering all of a sudden you could empathise with people who thought about taking their own life because they're just... trapped. I'm trying to stay in the present moment, just do things, because otherwise it's overwhelming."