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

Reward Offered In High-Profile Lewis Murder

Video

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

With Amanda in prison, Italian investigators revealed they were looking for a fourth suspect in the stabbing death of her roommate Meredith Kercher.

The man had left behind a bloody left hand print on a pillowcase found beneath the victim's head.

He'd also used the bathroom and neglected to flush, leaving DNA that matched other genetic evidence found on the murdered woman's body.

When they ran the bloody print, up came the name and photo not of Patrick Lumumba but someone else: Rudy Hermann Guede, a 20-year-old Perugia street hustler and general hangabout.

Student tour guide Zach Nowak recognized Rudy's face in the news right away. He was the lone wolf of the Piazza.

Zach Nowak: He's not someone I saw with other friends sitting there socializing. He's a guy who went in and out of bars and you'd see him at night walking the streets.
Dennis Murphy: Did this guy Rudy have a reputation for being a drug guy? He was the guy who could find you some smoke?
Zach Nowak: No, but he did have a reputation for being sort of the guy who bugged the girls. To the point where the girl would go to the bartender and say “Look, this guy is bugging me. Can you tell him to leave?”

Rudy was born in Africa's Ivory Coast but had been in Italy since the age of five. A local family who adopted him seems to have washed its hands of him when he got into minor scrapes with the law and he swapped working for hanging out at the basketball court.

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And, like Amanda and her crowd, Rudy had put himself up on YouTube making creepy faces.

"I'm a vampire," he says in the video, "Count Dracula. I'm going to' suck your blood."

The Italian papers reported that the night of the murder Rudy was seen later dancing into the wee hours at a Perugia student disco.

Why, asked the police, had Amanda and he reportedly talked by cell phone both before and after the murder?

The biggest question was: where was Rudy now?

The police quickly had a high-tech line on Rudy's whereabouts.

Richard Owen (reporter): They knew that he had used the internet a lot and had a 'Skype' account and they tracked it.

A SKYPE account allows people to talk computer to computer over the internet using it as a telephone.

Rudy, it turned out, was making calls to his friends in Perugia from Germany. Dusseldorf. He was in quick order arrested.

Rudy Guede was returned to Italy on Dec. 5. At first he claimed he wasn't in the cottage the night of the murder. Now, like Amanda, he's changed his initial story. In statements to both German authorities and to his lawyer, Rudy says he was in the house with Meredith when she died. He said they'd made a date the night before, on Halloween when she'd been dressed as a vampire. A date to meet at her house for a get-together that ended in consensual sex.

They went to bed, said Rudy, then he went down the hall to the bathroom with a bout of stomach cramps. He said he had his iPod on up loud when he heard Meredith screaming.

Richard Owen: He emerged from the bathroom to see her lying in a pool of blood and “an Italian I did not know” grasping a knife in his left hand. He and the unknown Italian then struggled. The Italian wounded him in the palm of his right hand and fled making some kind of racist remark as he did so, something to the effect that “they say in Italian a black man found is a black man condemned.” On other words, “they're going to think it was you.”

Rudy says he then cradled a dying Meredith in his arms who managed to whisper only the sound "Aff..."

Richard Owen: And Italian media has speculated that 'aff" might be Raffaele.
Dennis Murphy: That was a very operatic story, Richard...
Owen (laughing): It is...
Murphy: Final scene, dying in the arms, gasping out the name of the killer.
Owen: That's right. It' something, like something out of a thriller and it may be the police are skeptical about this version and it may indeed be a scenario taken from a thriller or a crime film.

While crime-scene technicians were finding rock-solid evidence of Rudy's presence in the murder house, they were coming up with nothing forensically on Lumumba, Amanda's boss from the bar.

No prints, no DNA, no bugged phone conversations implicating him.

On the same day Rudy Guede was arrested in Germany, Patrick Lumumba was released from prison for a lack of evidence.

Four weeks after the murder, Amanda and her lawyer appeared before a judge ostensibly to ask for release from prison. But the big news that day was Amanda's startling confession before the court about Lumumba. She'd made it all up, she said. He hadn't been in the house the night Meredith was murdered. She apologized for her false accusation.

Lumumba (through translator): I don't hate Amanda. I just want justice.

Lumumba talked to us after his release.

Dennis Murphy: Why did she do this to you?
Lumumba: (Translated) I think Amanda wanted to derail the investigation. That's what I think. She must have realized that the investigation was leading to her and must have thought that if she mentioned me -- because I’m black -- then the investigator's attention would shift to me. It's classic.

Lumumba says he saw Meredith only four times, the last, briefly, at the disco when she was dressed as a vampire. He told her to come see him on Friday and they'd talk about her running the bar once a week, making her special mojitos while a female DJ spun tunes.

Is it possible that Amanda -- on thin ice with her boss -- was jealous that Meredith, who she thought more popular and more polished, was going to get a kind of star turn in her bar?

Lumumba thinks maybe. He believes Amanda suffers from a Queen Bee syndrome.

Lumumba: (Translated) I can tell you she wants to be the center of attention. I think she's a person capable of doing anything to be in the spotlight.

Lumumba is free to resume his life though authorities say he still has the status of "suspect."

Dennis Murphy: She was eager to wrongfully accuse her boss Lumumba of being the person in the room...
Richard Owen: Correct.
Dennis Murphy: And yet she hasn't said anything about Rudy?
Owen: As far as I know, no. Which given that he is the third or, if you like, fourth suspect is rather odd.

Amanda has now retracted her story that she was in the house the night of the murder hearing her roommate's screams as she put her fingers in her ears.

She's back to story one, currently telling her family and lawyers that she was not in the house but at Raffaele's for the night and doesn't remember much of anything but flashes of visions as though in a dream.

And so it is with the fragments of the case to date -- mismatched puzzle pieces and accounts from the suspects themselves -- that are all over the map.