Meredith Kercher

Three weeks after Knox and Sollecito were convicted, Guede had his prison term cut from 30 to 24 years before the automatic one-third reduction given for the fast-track trial, resulting in a final sentence of 16 years. A lawyer representing the Kercher family protested the "drastic reduction" in the sentence. Guede had his first 36-hour release in June 2016, after nine years of prison.

The conviction of Knox and Sollecito was eventually annulled by the Supreme Court on March 27, 2015. The Supreme Court of Cassation invoked the provision of art. 530 § 2. of Italian Procedure Code ("reasonable doubt") and ordered that no further trial should be held, which resulted in their acquittal and end of case. The verdict pointed out that as scientific evidence was "central" to the case, there were "glaring defaillances" or "amnesia" and "culpable omissions of investigation activities".

On 27 March 2015, Italy's highest court, the Court of Cassation, ruled that Knox and Sollecito were innocent of murder, thereby definitively ending the case. Rather than merely declaring that there were errors in the earlier court cases or that there was insufficient evidence to convict, the court ruled that Knox and Sollecito had not committed the murder and were innocent of those charges, but it upheld Knox's conviction for slandering Patrick Lumumba.

In September 2015, the delegate Supreme Judge, Court adviser Mr. Gennaro Marasca, made public the reasons of absolution. First, none of the evidence demonstrated that either Knox or Sollecito was present at the crime scene. Second, they cannot have "materially participated in the homicide", since there were absolutely no "biological traces that could be attributed to them in the room of the murder or on the body of the victim, where in contrast numerous traces were found attributable to Guede".

The appeals verdicts of acquittal were declared null, however, for "manifest illogicalities" by the Supreme Court of Cassation of Italy in 2013. The appeals trials had to be repeated; they took place in Florence, where the two were convicted again in 2014.

On 3 October 2011, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted. A ruling that there was insufficient proof, similar to the verdict of not proven, was available to the court, but the court acquitted Knox and Sollecito completely. The conviction of Knox on a charge of slander of Patrick Lumumba was upheld, and the original one-year sentence was increased to three years and eleven days' imprisonment.

After this verdict was announced, Knox, who had been in the United States continuously since 2011, said in a statement: "The knowledge of my innocence has given me strength in the darkest times of this ordeal."

The appeal (or second grade) trial began in November 2010, presided over by Judges Claudio Pratillo Hellmann and Massimo Zanetti. A court-ordered review of the contested DNA evidence by independent experts noted numerous basic errors in the gathering and analysis of the evidence, and concluded that no evidential trace of Kercher's DNA had been found on the alleged murder weapon. Although the review confirmed the DNA fragments on the bra clasp included some from Sollecito, an expert testified that the context strongly suggested contamination.

Knox and Sollecito were held in prison. Their trial began on 16 January 2009 before Judge Giancarlo Massei, Deputy Judge Beatrice Cristiani, and six lay judges at the Corte d'Assise of Perugia. The charges were that Knox, Sollecito, and Guede had murdered Kercher in her bedroom. Knox and Sollecito both pleaded not guilty.

According to the prosecution, Knox had attacked Kercher in her bedroom, repeatedly banged her head against a wall, forcefully held her face, and tried to strangle her. Mignini suggested Knox had taunted Kercher and may have said, "You acted the goody-goody so much, now we are going to show you. Now you're going to be forced to have sex!" The prosecution hypothesized that Guede, Knox, and Sollecito had removed Kercher's jeans, and held her on her hands and knees while Guede sexually abused her; that Knox had cut Kercher with a knife before inflicting the fatal stab wound; and that she had then stolen Kercher's mobile phones and money to fake a burglary. On 5 December 2009, Knox and Sollecito were convicted of murder and sentenced to 26 and 25 years' imprisonment, respectively.

In their official report on the court's decision to overturn the convictions, the appeal trial judges wrote that the verdict of guilty at the original trial "was not corroborated by any objective element of evidence". Describing the police interviews of Knox as of "obsessive duration", the judges said that the statements she made incriminating herself and Lumumba during interrogation were evidence of her confusion while under "great psychological pressure". The judges further noted that a tramp who had testified to seeing Sollecito and Knox in the Piazza Grimana on the night of the murder was a heroin addict; that Massei, the judge at the 2009 trial, had used the word "probably" 39 times in his report; and that there was no evidence of any phone calls or texts between Knox or Sollecito, and Guede.

Guede was tried separately in a fast-track procedure and in October 2008 was found guilty of the sexual assault and murder of Kercher. He subsequently exhausted the appeals process and is currently serving a 16-year sentence.

The court found that his version of events did not match the forensic evidence, and that he could not explain why one of his palm prints, stained with Kercher's blood, had been found on the pillow of the single bed, under the disrobed body. Guede said he had left Kercher fully dressed. He was found guilty in October 2008 of murder and sexual assault, and sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment. Judge Micheli acquitted Guede of theft, suggesting that there had been no break-in.

Perugia, a well-known cultural and artistic centre, is a city of 150,000 people. More than a quarter of the population are students, many from abroad, giving it a vibrant social scene. In Perugia, Kercher shared a four-bedroom ground-floor flat in a house at Via della Pergola 7 (43°06′53″N 12°23′29″E  /  43.1148°N 12.3914°E  / 43.1148; 12.3914  (Via della Pergola 7, Perugia ) Coordinates: 43°06′53″N 12°23′29″E  /  43.1148°N 12.3914°E  / 43.1148; 12.3914  (Via della Pergola 7, Perugia ) ). Her flatmates were two Italian women in their late twenties, Filomena Romanelli and Laura Mezzetti, and a 20-year-old American student from the University of Washington, Amanda Knox, who was attending the University for Foreigners in Perugia on an exchange year. Kercher and Knox moved in on 10 and 20 September 2007, respectively, meeting each other for the first time. Kercher typically called her mother daily on a mobile phone; a second mobile phone she used was registered to her flatmate, Romanelli.

Also in mid-October, Kercher and Knox attended the EuroChocolate festival. On 25 October 2007, Kercher and Knox attended a classical music concert where Knox met Raffaele Sollecito, a 23-year-old computer science student, at the University of Perugia.

By Knox's account, having spent the night with Sollecito, she arrived at Via della Pergola 7 on the morning of 2 November 2007, finding the front door open and drops of blood in the bathroom she shared with Kercher. Kercher's bedroom door was locked, which Knox took as indicating that Kercher was sleeping. After showering in the bathroom she and Kercher shared, Knox found faeces in the toilet of the bathroom shared by Romanelli and Mezzetti. Knox went back to Sollecito's home and later returned with him to Via della Pergola 7. Noticing a broken window in Romanelli's bedroom and alarmed that Kercher did not answer her door, Sollecito unsuccessfully tried to force the door open. Sollecito called his sister, a lieutenant in the carabinieri, for advice. She advised him to call the 112 emergency number, which he did.

A funeral was held on 14 December 2007 at Croydon Parish Church, with more than 300 people in attendance, followed by a private burial at Croydon's Mitcham Road Cemetery. The degree that Kercher would have received in 2009 was awarded posthumously by the University of Leeds.

The young men who lived in the downstairs flat at Via della Pergola 7 were unable to recall how Guede had met them, but they did recall how, after his first visit to their home, they had found him later in the bathroom, sitting asleep on the unflushed toilet, which was full of faeces. Guede allegedly committed break-ins, including one of a lawyer's office through a second floor window, and another during which he burgled a flat and brandished a jackknife when confronted. On 27 October 2007, days before Kercher's murder, Guede was arrested in Milan after breaking into a nursery school; he was reportedly found by police with an 11-inch (28 cm) knife that had been taken from the school kitchen.

Guede went to a friend's house at about 11:30 pm on 1 November 2007, the night of the murder. He later went to a nightclub where he stayed until 4:30 a.m. On the following night, 2 November 2007, Guede went to the same nightclub with three American female students whom he had met in a bar. He then left Italy for Germany, where he would be located in the subsequent weeks.

In outlining the case for colleagues hours after the discovery of the body, Perugia Reparto volanti (Mobile Squad) Detective Superintendent Monica Napoleoni told them that the murderer was definitely not a burglar and that apparent signs of a break-in were staged as a deliberate deception. Knox was the only occupant of the house who had been nearby on the night of the murder; she said she had spent the night of 1 November with Sollecito at his flat. Over the next four days, Knox was repeatedly interviewed without being given access to a lawyer. She later testified that she was subjected to pressure tactics and struck by police to make her incriminate herself. She was arrested and charged with murder at noon on 6 November 2007.

Napoleoni was backed by several other detectives in arguing for the arrest of Knox, Sollecito, and Patrick Lumumba, the latter whom Knox had implicated as being involved. However, Napoleoni's immediate superior, Chief Superintendent Marco Chiacchiera, thought arrests would be premature and advocated close surveillance of the suspects as the best way to further the investigation. On 8 November 2007, Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba appeared before Judge Claudia Matteini, and during an hour-long adjournment Knox met her lawyers for the first time. Matteini ordered Knox, Sollecito, and Lumumba to be detained for a year. On 19 November 2007, the Rome forensic police matched fingerprints found in Kercher's bedroom to Rudy Guede. On 20 November 2007, Guede was arrested in Germany, and Lumumba was released. The prosecution charged Guede with the murder.

Kercher studied European politics and Italian at the University of Leeds. Working as a barmaid, tour guide and in promotions to support herself, she made a cameo appearance in the music video for Kristian Leontiou's song "Some Say" in 2004. She aspired to work for the European Union or as a journalist. In October 2007, she attended the University of Perugia, where she began courses in modern history, political theory, and the history of cinema. Fellow students later described her as caring, intelligent, witty, and popular.

Rudy Hermann Guede (born 26 December 1986, Abidjan, Ivory Coast) was 20 years old at the time of the murder. He had lived in Perugia since the age of five. In Italy, Guede was raised with the help of his school teachers, a local priest, and others. Guede's father returned to Ivory Coast in 2004. Guede, then aged 17, was adopted by a wealthy Perugia family. He played basketball for the Perugia youth team in the 2004–2005 season. Guede said that he had met a couple of the Italian men from the lower level of Via della Pergola 7 while spending evenings at the basketball court in the Piazza Grimana. In mid-2007, his adoptive family asked him to leave their home.

Meredith Susanna Cara Kercher (28 December 1985 – 1 November 2007) was a British student on exchange from the University of Leeds who was murdered at the age of 21 in Perugia, Italy. Kercher was found dead on the floor of her bedroom. By the time the bloodstained fingerprints at the scene were identified as belonging to Rudy Guede, police had charged Kercher's American flatmate, Amanda Knox, and Knox's Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The subsequent prosecutions of Knox and Sollecito received international publicity, with forensic experts and jurists taking a critical view of the evidence supporting the initial guilty verdicts.

Meredith Susanna Cara Kercher (born 28 December 1985 in Southwark, South London), known to her friends as "Mez", lived in Coulsdon, South London. Kercher attended the Old Palace School in Croydon. She was enthusiastic about the language and culture of Italy, and after a school exchange trip she returned, aged 15, to spend her summer vacation with a family in Sessa Aurunca.