ROME — The parents of University of Washington student Amanda Knox visited their daughter in jail Saturday.
During a closed court appearance Friday, Knox said she was not in her Perugia apartment the night Meredith Kercher was killed, but was rather at the home of her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, said Kercher family attorney Francesco Maresca.
But during the hearing, prosecutors presented the court with an intercepted conversation Knox had with her parents while in jail, in which she appeared to indicate she was indeed in the apartment she shared with Kercher, Maresca said.
He confirmed Italian media reports citing the intercepts in which Knox was quoted as saying: “It’s stupid. I can’t say otherwise; I was there and I can’t lie about that.”
Calls to Knox’s attorney, Luciano Ghirga, were not answered Saturday. The La Stampa daily quoted Ghirga as saying that the quote places Amanda in Sollecito’s home, not her own.
Kercher, 21, was found dead Nov. 1 in the apartment she shared with Knox in the central Italian town of Perugia where both were studying. She had been sexually assaulted and died of a knife wound to the neck.
Knox, Sollecito and an Ivory Coast native, Rudy Hermann Guede, have been detained in the slaying. On Friday, a court ruled that Knox and Sollecito must remain in detention.
Guede was arrested in Germany on an international arrest warrant issued by Italian authorities and is awaiting extradition to Italy.
Guede has acknowledged that he was in Kercher’s room the night she died, but said he didn’t kill her and that an Italian who is trying to frame him did. DNA testing has confirmed that Guede had sex with Kercher the night of the slaying.
A fourth person, Diya “Patrick” Lumumba was released from jail for lack of evidence.
All four deny wrongdoing.
Knox has given contradictory stories to prosecutors, initially saying she was at Sollecito’s apartment the night of the slaying, then saying she was at home and that at one point had to cover her ears to drown out Kercher’s screams. She had at one point fingered Lumumba as the killer.
Maresca said that during Friday’s hearing, Knox went back to her initial version that she was not in the apartment.
Maresca confirmed that prosecutors had obtained a diary Knox had written while in custody. News reports Saturday said that in the diary, Knox hypothesizes that Sollecito could have killed Kercher, slipping out of his apartment while she slept.
Sollecito has maintained he was at home the entire night of the slaying, working on his computer and watching a movie.
On Saturday, Knox’s parents, William Knox and Edda Mellas, visited their daughter in jail, but declined to speak to reporters outside.
Francesco Sollecito, Raffaele’s father, also visited his son in jail and said he found him “serene” despite the court setback. He said his son had asked him “What do they want from me?”
“We expected a different outcome,” the elder Sollecito told reporters.
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