A PART OF ME DID DIE IN ITALY'

Ten years ago, Amanda Knox was finally cleared of the brutal murder of her housemate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy. But is she really free? She talks to Simon Hattenstone about howreturning to her old life felt like entering anew kind of prison’

-  Patrick Kehoe

AMANDA KNOX SAYS SHE IS ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES. She and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito had their convictions for the murder of Meredith Kercher overturned for the second and final time in 2015. She now presents a successful podcast called Labyrinths, is a TV producer and bestselling author, does standup comedy and campaigns against miscarriages of justice.

She is married to Christopher Robinson, a writer, and they have two gorgeous toddlers. Life could not be much better or fuller. Her new book is called Free. But it could just as easily be called Still Not Free.

Knox's search for freedom has led her down surprising paths. Most surprising was her decision to write to and then befriend Giuliano Mignini, the conspiracy-theorist prosecutor who created the shocking narrative that Kercher, a 21-year-old Londoner on a student exchange in Perugia, was killed in 2007 by Knox, Sollecito and Rudy Guede after a drug-fuelled sex game got out of hand. Shocking in itself. But even more shocking because Knox, then aged 20, and Sollecito, 23, had only been going out with each other for six days and neither had previous convictions. And most shocking of all because there was DNA evidence at the murder scene suggesting that Guede (who had been arrested the previous week in Milan for breaking into a nursery school armed with a knife) was the killer, and none implicating Knox and Sollecito.