Deadly exchange

INTERACTIVE

A look at the United Nations of people in the gruesome case of a British student's murder in Italy, and the arrest of her roommate Amanda Knox, along with two other suspects

Dateline NBC

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Pizza, chocolate and a living room
rom the steps that are the city's 'living room' to how to make a pizza, student Zach Nowak gives a tour of the Italian city of Perugia.

Dateline NBC

Perugia straddles the hills in the middle of the Italian boot about a hundred miles north of Rome.

This ancient stone city can boost tourist-worthy palazzos, piazzas and tucked-away churches with gems of Renaissance art.

But for the 40,000 university students who go to school here, every bit as much of a lure is the vibrant late-night scene.

There are plenty of cool places to hang and be young together.

Zach Nowak: It's a university city but almost like a campus -- at least the top of the hill is like a university campus.

Ex-pat American Zach Nowak enjoys being a tour guide to the new arrivals. The central fountain is the hook-up place.

Zach Nowak: About 100 people all on the piazza and they'll be playing guitar, drinking beer and doing stuff that college kids do everywhere.

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After a few weeks of visiting relatives in Germany, Amanda Knox, the 20-year-old American language student from Seattle, was on her way to Perugia by late August.

She arrived on the train from Florence. Amanda had to find a place to live before classes started in September at the University for Foreigners.

Near a wall on the university is a place where students post messages. And it was right there that a young Italian woman was in the process of putting up a flyer looking for a roommate. Like so much else about this murder mystery we can follow along in cyber-space as Amanda recounts what happened next in her blog.

(from Amanda's blog)
"I chat it up with her...and we go immediately to her place ...we enter though the gate and there it is. I'm in love."

Amanda took photos of the cozy three-bedroom house, the tidy kitchen, the terrace with a five-star view.

There would be four roomies in all -- two Italian women and another foreign student arriving from England. She was 21-year-old Meredith Kercher; she'd doing some post-grad work in political history.

Amanda, meanwhile, went back to Germany for a few restless weeks.

On Sept. 20, Amanda arrived back here in Perugia, met her new roommate Meredith, dropped her bags, and dove immediately into the student scene. She'd always worked odd jobs to make ends meet and the former barista from Seattle quickly got herself hired here, at this popular hangout bar, Le Chic. Student by day, waitress every Tuesday and Thursday night, $65 bucks a week plus tips. Amanda wrote that she loved meeting new people, off-beat characters and Le Chic had a steady supply of those.

Lumumba: She was the first American we met and we hired her because of that.

Amanda's boss was a 38-year-old Congolese man called Patrick Lumumba, the bar's owner. He'd been in Perugia almost 20-years, an African student who never went home. He sang reggae music and was known to one and all on the bar circuit.

The bar owner was increasingly displeased with his new American waitress for flirting and dancing with the customers and he told her so.

Lumumba: Things didn't go very well. Often, I would have to remind her to take care of the customers. She would apologize but would eventually get distracted by her friends.

Lumumba was thinking of firing her.

And Amanda was getting on someone else's nerves too. The new roommate from England, Meredith, found the American sloppy around the house.

Richard Owen (reporter for the London Times): Never picked up, wouldn't do the chores. Never put out the garbage.

And more worrying was the parade of men Amanda was bringing back to the cottage.

Richard Owen, correspondent for the London Times in Italy, is filing almost daily stories based on what his sources in the investigation are telling him, including one report that Meredith told her British girlfriends she was actually scared of some of the strays Amanda came home with on a regular basis.

Owen: People who Meredith Kercher distrusted. Didn't like the look of. It appears that it got to the point where she actually confronted Amanda about this.
Murphy: So she's waking up in the morning and there's somebody in the kitchen making tea. It's “Who are you, again?”
Owen: That's right, yeah. Exactly that. And so it, the picture builds up, really, of maybe four, five perhaps more, points of friction between these two girls who previously hadn't known each other at all.

Still, it was Italy in the glorious fall and neither roommate had time to squander on petty fights.

Perugia is the Hershey Pennsylvania of Italy and the annual chocolate festival was underway in the streets. If love wasn't in the air, then companionship--the casual hook-up--certainly was.

At a concert about three-weeks into her Italian adventure, Amanda met a 23-year old-Italian computer engineering student named Raffaele Sollecito. He's a prominent doctor's son with his own apartment, a collection of exotic knives and an expensive German car.

Owen: Clearly not short of cash and I think is much taken with this bright and breezy energetic American girl, blonde American girl who immediately takes up with him and indeed sleeps with him on the first night they meet.

Meredith, the roommate, had found a boyfriend, too. A guitar player in a band who lived in an apartment beneath the rental house.

Meredith, like Amanda, had favorite nightspots.

Richard Owen: I think there is a picture being painted here of a girl who perhaps certainly enjoyed going out and enjoyed the discos and the pubs but with reservations. Did not take things to extremes, in other words. She had limits.

Despite the tension between the roomies, and separate circles of friends, Amanda and Meredith did the bar circuit together sometimes.

We know Meredith had accompanied Amanda to Lumumba's bar for her job interview.

Meredith reportedly hit it off that night with Lumumba, and she told him about a delicious mojito she knew how to concoct. The bar owner tucked away the information.

Perugia was turning out to be student heaven: classes followed by party nights waiting around every bend. Halloween was the next rave up.

Raffaele -- the doctor's son -- costumed as a ghoulish surgeon with a cleaver showed up at Lumumba's bar that night with Amanda, who didn't work Wednesdays.

Meredith and her pals were bar hopping too. Meredith dressed as a vampire with fake blood trickling down her mouth on Oct. 31. Next to her was a partyer wearing the mask made famous in "Scream" the student slasher horror series.

The following day was a solemn Catholic holy day--All Saints Day. The partied-out students slept-off the night before. The two Italian roommates at the rental house had gone home for what would be, in effect, a long weekend.