Walking into a murder scene and becoming the suspect

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:01][music] >> When I came home, I discovered that there was something amiss. And it wasn't immediately clear to me what was wrong.

[00:00:10]There was but things were off, right?

[00:00:12]Like my my front door was open.

[00:00:15]Um there was a few speckles of blood in my bathroom, but nothing that immediately alarmed me to the actual horribleness that had happened. Um I do the one thing that alarmed me immediately and that gave me sort of a shiver down my spine was when I found feces in um the bathroom that my Italian roommates had. So there were two bathrooms um and I and Meredith used one and Filomena and Laura used another. And I only went into their bathroom to use their hair dryer. But when I was in there, I noticed that there was feces in the in the in the um toilet and that immediately gave me the creeps because I felt like my roommates wouldn't have left the toilet unflushed and that made me feel like somebody I was afraid all of a sudden that somebody was in the house with me. Yeah. And so I I left and I went back to Raffaele's and I was like, "Oh my god, uh I don't know what to think. There is weird stuff in my house." But he was like, "Well, I don't know what that is, but you should just call your roommates and see what's going on." And so I start calling my roommates. I can only get a hold of one of them, Filomena. Both Laura and Meredith are not answering their phones. And I tell Filomena what happened and she says, "Oh my gosh, okay, well, let's go home and we'll check it all out together."

[00:01:41]So I go back with Raffaele and we start poking around and looking more seriously at what's going on. I was just sort of in and out that first time, take a shower, get changed, leave.

[00:01:53]As we're poking around, we discover that there's a broken window. So, someone has definitely broken into our house and immediately I ask Raffaella to call the police because our house has been broken into and meanwhile I'm calling Filomena telling her what's going on and we're continuing to look around the house to see if there is anything missing, if anything stolen. We go into Laura's room, everything is perfect, nothing has been touched, her bed is still made and then we go to Meredith's room and her door is locked which is weird because the only times I've ever seen her lock her door was when she was inside. And she's not answering when I bang on the door and I ask Raffaella to try to kick in the door. He tries to kick in the door, doesn't succeed and eventually we just go outside and decide to wait for Filomena and the cops to arrive. The cops arrive first but they are not the cops that Raffaella called, they're different cops. They have found Meredith's cell phones and they're well, they don't know whose cell phones they are at the time. They're saying we found these cell phones and they're registered to Filomena. So, there's this whole like confusing atmosphere going on of what is going on? Where is Meredith? Where is Filomena? Where's Laura? Why are Filomena's phones here? That doesn't make any sense. I just talked to her on the phone. So, we're all just trying to make sense of this and it's only once Filomena arrives and starts talking to the police that she explains, well, I gave the SIM card to Meredith so those are Meredith's phones and where is Meredith? We need to figure out like and I tell her the door is locked to her bedroom. She's like, what are you talking about? And then basically she and her boyfriend finally kick in Meredith's door and discover her body.

[00:03:34]And Meredith like I never I never thankfully saw into her room. Yeah. Um like I I eventually saw, you know, autopsy photos and all of that but like I never had to see it personally myself.

[00:03:50]Yeah.

[00:03:51]What it was was a very gruesome crime scene, right? Like Meredith had been raped and stabbed to death by the person who had broken into our house.

[00:04:04]And immediately everyone just starts yelling or screaming in Italian. I'm the only person who's not fluent, who's trying to figure out what's going on.

[00:04:14]We're all sort of pushed out of the house by the police. And now my home is a crime scene. It's under investigation.

[00:04:23]I'm no longer allowed onto the premises.

[00:04:25]I'm just sort of standing there trying to take in what is happening. I don't know what my roommate has seen in Meredith's room. She's screaming something about blood and a foot and the closet. And so I'm wondering if there is a bloody foot in the closet. Like I just don't know what's going on. And it takes time and help from Raffaele to piece together what it was that was discovered, which is Meredith's body in her room. And Amanda, with the chaos that you just described, that's a situation I'm very familiar with when you get called to a homicide scene and all that.

[00:05:01]I think the confusion and the chaos worked against you from a prosecution point of view, assumptions that were being made and and things and the way way you described it. And I've looked at your story from a yeah, the homicide lens and thinking okay, I could see how that could be interpreted, this could be. But it looks like it was just a series of things that worked against you. And there was the cultural language barriers that I think think came in came into play.

[00:05:28]And the expectation of of how you reacted. I think there was a lot drawn from and this is correct me if I'm wrong, a lot lot drawn from how you're reacting to to the report of your your friend being killed. Now, I see that quite often in in policing and investigations where and what I've learned over the extended period of time, everyone reacts differently to situations. Sometimes where showing no emotion, you think oh they're being cold and I think that was situation thrown at you.

[00:06:02]You've described the scene and the chaos and you've learned that your your your friend's been killed, so you got the trauma there.

[00:06:09]Then when the police started investigating it, my understanding is that you were um in interrogation and the different between an interrogation or getting a witness statement, but in essence for 5 days you spent 53 hours sitting down sitting down with police.

[00:06:25]Do you want to tell us that experience from your perspective cuz that would have been very confusing I would imagine.

[00:06:29]>> Yeah. Yeah, and I mean all of that started like as soon as they pushed us like even before the they pushed us out of the house like I'm answering police questions and attempting to respond to what they're asking.

[00:06:43]Not fully again not fully fluent in the language, so am I understanding their question correctly? Am I responding to their question correctly? Is there's definite like language barrier that's playing a role?

[00:06:57]And then of course, you know, in the immediacy of being told there's a body in there like I go into a state of like complete shock. I sort of go dead possum where I'm just like I mean there's foot I mean you can see footage of this now to this day you can go back and look and you I'm sort of just like staring into space like oh my god. Meanwhile, my roommate who is Italian and who actually saw Meredith's body is like freaking out and crying hysterically and so people are noting oh, here's one roommate just standing there and another one who's crying hysterically and it's like well there are cultural differences, there are language differences, there's uh age differences, there's the fact [clears throat] that like I'm like again, nothing bad had ever happened to me in my life and so I went into a state of like almost immediate denial like this cannot be happening.

[00:07:51]This cannot be happening. And then you know, eventually I'm dragged off to the police station along with everyone else to answer questions and I'm doing this to the best of my ability in a foreign language.

[00:08:04]>> Yeah. I'm I'm telling them everything that I know which is nothing. Like I just came home and found my roommate dead and there's no rhyme or reason that I can think of for this happening.

[00:08:16]They're asking me, you know, did anyone have any, you know, did anyone hate Meredith or have anything against her?

[00:08:22]And I'm like, "No, what are you talking about? Like >> Yeah. she was just a nice person. We're just here to study abroad. Like who would even know her long enough to hate her? Like this doesn't make any sense."

[00:08:33]And I immediately I'm thinking that there must be some kind of serial killer out there maybe who targeted the house.

[00:08:39]I'm when I finally get a moment of like I'm no longer I go through hours of questioning with the police and I'm finally released from that just for a moment in the waiting room and I call, you know, my parents. I call my family.

[00:08:52]Try to tell them what's going on. It's the middle of the night for them. You know, like everyone's just scrambling.

[00:08:57]And I mean, it's interesting that people again are focusing on my behavior and saying that I was cold or not crying enough because, you know, even looking back it's not like everyone was crying hysterically in the police station.

[00:09:16]There were a lot of people who were also experiencing just shock. And just like going into a state of numbness and then intermittently crying like I mean, I feel like I honestly wasn't that much different than anyone else. Like suddenly I would get a like a full like I would feel just kicked in the stomach with the reality of what was happening and I would cry and then, you know, a few minutes later I would just be exhausted and depleted and just sort of sitting there like a zombie and my boyfriend's there doing his best to be the knight in shining armor that he aspires to be and he's comforting me and, you know, try like letting me sit on his lap and cuddling me and and even telling me some jokes to try to cheer me up and you know, that ended up being turned against you know, people saying, "How could he have told you jokes and how could have you have giggled at a time like this?" And it's like, "Well, I'm sitting there for hours answering questions trying to figure out what's going on in this extremely brutal and overwhelming situation."

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