That crime forms the staple diet of media reporting has long been acknowledged. Yet, not every crime sells and even within the same category of offending there are huge variations as to what makes a particular case newsworthy. Some murder stories barely cause a ripple, while others simply will run and run, generating headlines for years to come as the investigation turns into arrest, trial, appeal and, in some instances, retrial and exoneration. What is more, rather than just generating interest in the local or national press, some stories will command worldwide media interest. A few do not even require the spectacle of a trial to keep the media interest alive: the case of Madeleine McCann, the British child who disappeared on holiday in Portugal in 2007, has been making the news globally on and off for nearly a decade, despite the fact that her fate is still unknown and not a single suspect has been put on trial. The Internet and social media are capable of amplifying the geographical reach of such stories, increasing pressure on the police and other authorities to investigate or solve a case, or sometimes reopen it. In December 2015, it was a much-talked-about documentary by Netflix, the US-based on-demand channel streaming over the Internet, that provoked international outcry over the murder conviction of Steven Avery in Wisconsin. Online petitions generating more than 380,000 signatures against his conviction were indicative of a global response to what would have remained a local case with limited topicality without the online exposure.
The murder of Meredith Kercher in the Umbrian town of Perugia (Italy) in 2007 is another such case that has proved to have a transnational, but crucially also, a transmedia appeal, generating lurid headlines in the traditional tabloids as well causing intense speculation and heated debate in online forums. The transnational aspect of the case is in part attributable to the mix of nationalities involved. Meredith, an undergraduate student from Leeds University in the UK, went to study at the UniversitĂ per Stranieri in Perugia as a study-abroad student. She shared a house with two Italian women and one American exchange student who came to define the case in the media: Amanda Knox. She, of course, was only one of three main suspects in the murder case, the other two being the Italian Raffaele Sollecito, from the South of Italy, and Rudy Guede, a naturalised Italian citizen who was consistently noted in the press for having been born in the Ivory Coast, despite having lived in Italy since the age of six. Italy, Britain, the USA and the Ivory Coast became the topographical markers of the case, with a diversity of racial and national stereotypes informing the media framing process. The case offered up plenty of others who could be exoticised: for the media outside Italy, Perugia, set in the Umbrian hilltops and an obligatory destination on the tourist trail, amounted to the fantasy Mediterranean setting replete with stereotypes about the inefficiency and untrustworthiness of the Southern European bureaucrat (Annunziato 2011). The Italian criminal justice system, especially the role of the public prosecutor, was heavily criticised and also to some extent misunderstood, with some of its idiosyncrasies getting lost in translation in foreign media (see Boyd and Montana in this volume). 1 To European and other non-American audiences, it was the Americana of Amanda Knox, the college student and girl next door who was perceived to have very liberal attitudes to sex and drugs, that offered its own kind of exoticism. Depending on the media context, the wild child image thrust upon Knox in turn clashed with the portrayal of Meredith Kercherâs British reserve (see Holohan in this volume). The African background of Guede was a simple enough signifier conjuring up racial and colonial connotations that barely needed explaining to Western audiences consuming the media saga of the Kercher murder (see Heim in this volume).
At the time of Knoxâs and Sollecitoâs arrest, social media were still in their infancy (Facebook was not yet a household name) but when they were released on appeal five years later, âFacebook justiceâ had become a reality, with their supporters harnessing the power of a fully fledged social media landscape to campaign for their exoneration, affording them a space in which to dissect, analyse and discuss the case at leisure, often in painstaking detail. Crucially, the online campaign enabled some supporters to identify with the cause on a very personal level by becoming part of a translocal community, which they would have been unlikely to have participated in without social media (Bortoluzzi in this volume). It is also striking that fledgling social media were already firmly on the radar of the news media very early on in the case and proved something of a treasure trove. Sollecitoâs now infamous photo in which he posed as a mad surgeon wielding a large knife was eagerly recycled in the press as indicative of his guilt (a knife being the murder weapon in the Kercher murder), while Knoxâs âFoxy Knoxyâ moniker unearthed on her own Myspace page alongside photographs and other self-authored materials cemented her hyper-sexualised media image, despite protestations from her family and supporters that the epithet was only ever meant to signify her sporting prowess. As Goulandris and McLaughlin note in this volume, â[t]his is the first example of the British press lifting text and images from suspectsâ social media sites, and reworking that information to create killer identities. In so doing, Knox and Sollecito become one of the main âevidentialâ sources of their guilt.â
Winning the media battle to prove that Knox and Sollecito were innocent proved very hard because the coverage was overwhelmingly pro-guilt, bolstered by the initial guilty verdict in 2009. The pairâs own media appearances became much more carefully managed, especially when compared with their early social media presence. High-profile television interviews, exclusive book deals, the involvement of a PR firm representing Knox and a much more tightly managed social media profile were the hallmarks of the celebrification of Knox and, to a much lesser extent, Sollecito. However, as Simkin notes in this volume, despite the carefully managed appearances, Knox was unable to shake off her hyper-sexualised media image originating in the earliest media reports on the case (see Clifford, Holohan, and Goulandris and McLaughlin in this volume).
The case is one of the first transmedia crime stories, by which we mean that the story was shaped and influenced by circulating between a variety of media platforms, gaining further momentum in the process. The term âtransmedia storytellingâ was originally developed by Jennings who used it to describe a way of using different channels for delivering âa unified and coordinated entertainment experienceâ (Jenkins 2010, p. 944) as regards fiction. It has since been evolved to define âthe increasingly interconnected and open-ended circulation of media content between various platforms, where the subjects previously known as âthe audienceâ are increasingly involved in the production of flowsâ (Jansson 2013, p. 287). Old media formats still matter in giving exposure to an issue. No matter how much buzz something is creating online, it is only when it is picked up by the dominant media outlets (some of which are themselves exclusively Internet-based) that the story usually breaks through into in the mainstream public sphere, evidence of the continuing importance of the traditional media. On the other hand, diminished and under-resourced news media are prone to the kind of churnalism that feeds on cheaply sourced social media information, demonstrating their increasing dependency on user-generated Internet content. A handful of characters on Twitter have the capacity to explode into a major news story, as Knox herself experienced with her 2014 tweet involving a selfie in which she was holding the placard âSIAMO INNOCENTIâ (âwe are innocentâ) (Clifford in this volume).
What does the transmedia aspect mean for the way in which crime is reported and publicly discussed? For a start, it means that the institutions and organisations which have traditionally been able to act as âprimary definersâ (Hall et al. 1978) and issue authoritative statements have seen their monopoly over the truth eroded. It is no longer just the press, the police, prosecutors and lawyers who partake in this crucial conversation, but ordinary media users everywhere are able to wade in and challenge officially sanctioned interpretations of guilt and innocence. Crowd-sourced intelligence cannot always be dismissed as simple Internet speculation, especially not when it is born of the efforts of what we have previously termed âamateur-expertsâ (Gies and Bortoluzzi 2014) who, prima facie at least, possess the qualifications to transfer and apply expertise from relevant fields (science, medicine, law and so on) to probe the work of official crime agencies. In the transmedia age, crime knowledge originates across a potentially wide cross section of communication channels. Of course, the wisdom of crowds should not be romanticised. Social media are also routinely inhabited by Internet trolls who are capable of compromising core legal principles such as the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair hearing. Knox and Sollecito, as the most high-profile suspects in the Kercher murder case, have been at the receiving end of much online abuse, although it remains debatable which inflicted more injuries in this instance: the diatribe of Internet trolls or the invective of the tabloids. The media case against the pair found as much fertile ground online as it did in the traditional press, with ample scope for convergence, for example, in the shape of readersâ comments commonly found in the online version of newspaper articles (see Boyd in this volume).
The various discourses circulating online put the gender dimension of this case into sharp relief, with the Internet creating a space for unbridled and frequently abusive commentary disproportionately aimed at Knox. The story, fronted by a photogenic young woman, proved useful clickbait with which to generate Internet traffic. Even by tabloid standards, the language with which Knox was characterised has been astounding at times. But the use of such language has not been confined to the media and the Internet. During the proceedings, Knox was called a witch and a she-devil (Simkin in this volume), language that seems utterly unbecoming for a courtroom in a twenty-first-century democracy. The sensational prosecution case against Knox and Sollecito, that of a sex game gone wrong, put Knox firmly in the frame as the main instigator of a horrific sexually motivated crime who dragged two men (Guede and Sollecito) down with her in the pursuit of her manipulative desires. Every detail was savoured by the media: Knoxâs sexual habits and fantasies (conveniently rendered in a short piece of fiction about rape she wrote before the murder) were pored over and implicitly condemned. Knoxâs media treatment qualifies as a classic case of âslut-shamingâ (Simkin in this volume). As Holohan notes in this volume, â[w]hat is[âŠ]curious, particularly on the surface, is how this deeply moral vision of female sexuality, remains popular, and can still capture the popular imagination, in a historical period which has transformed sex and sexuality into a commodityâ.
Knoxâs own attempts to set the record straight provided the media with the perfect excuse to further entrench her hyper-sexualised image. Her perceived lack of sexual conformity was sufficient to overshadow the two male accused in the acres of media coverage devoted to the case. Men who (allegedly) are driven to kill by lust are hardly newsworthy, but a young, attractive woman who commits a sexually motivated crime is, in the words of Goulandris and McLaughlin in this volume, âtabloid goldâ. The media treatment of women who kill has been the subject of academic analysis on many occasions; one of the questions in this case concerns the extent to which the transmedia aspects contributed to the hyperbole but also to casual neglect of the facts that seemed to characterise much of the media coverage.
It was Knox, much more than Sollecito and Guede, who became a celebrity. Being perpetually referred to as Amanda Knoxâs ex-boyfriend in the media, Sollecito struggled to have his own voice heard and gain recognition as a victim of a miscarriage of justice in his own right (Gies in this volume). Similarly, Guede had an identity forced upon him, raising uncomfortable questions about race, immigration and otherness and the extent to which these informed the media treatment of his offending as relatively un-newsworthy (Heim in this volume). Knoxâs own star qualities provide a vivid illustration of the role of deviance in the acquisition of celebrity status. There is nothing inherently new about offenders who become well known on account of their alleged criminality. However, what is different about Knox is that she embraced her celebrity, not necessarily by choice but by default, as part of a strategy to repair her public image and establish her innocence, using the full panoply of transmedia forms available to her. Hence, Clifford in this volume calls for âa reconsideration of traditional criminological assumptions about the representation of crime and criminality within the context of celebrity culture and a changing mediascape, where the once clearly delineated boundaries between production and consumption, object and audience, public and private, authenticity and self-promotion have collapsed.â Ironically, however, the harder Knox tried to show her real or âveridicalâ self across a variety of media platforms, the more elusive the real Knox became, giving her detractors further ammunition to doubt her sincerity and crucially also her innocence. In other words, the transmediated Knox whose voice could be heard in court, in her autobiography, in chat show interviews and in social media failed to reveal the âone and onlyâ Knox she herself wanted the wider world to see and believe.
The contributions in this volume are written from several disciplinary perspectives and reflect the variety of approaches that can be taken to a highly mediatised and complex legal case such as the Kercher murder case. What the chapters demonstrate is how profoundly the new media landscape is impacting on the way in which different stakeholders, from suspectsâ and victimsâ families to journalists and the general public, are participating in the public narrative involving a particular crime. The ability to talk backâto challenge the media and the authorities by utilising a variety of interactive channelsâhas revealed itself to be both empowering and disempowering. More media has not always been conducive to improving the quality of the public debate but when faced with a media onslaught the key players in the Kercher murder case were left with very little choice other than trying to influence the debate in their favour. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the ability to engage in transmedia storytelling unlocked opportunities for commentary and knowledge about the case which would only have been the preserve of a privileged few before the advent of social media. We hope that this volume offers an important contribution to understanding this new interface between crime and media. It does not seek to claim that what was known about crime in the media has been swept aside; rather it aims to shine a light on what at times seems a veritable collision between old and new media ways of bringing crime stories to public attention.
Overview of Main Events in the Meredith Kercher Murder Case
On 2 November 2007, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher was found murdered in the house she shared with three others in the Via della Pergola in Perugia. She had been sexually assaulted and her throat had been cut. Meredith Kercher, an undergraduate student from Leeds University, was in Perugia as a study-abroad student at the local university. Giuliano Mignini, who was to be the lead prosecutor in the Knox/Sollecito murder trial, was among the first officials to deal with the crime scene. His actions throughout would attract much criticism among innocence supporters.
While forensic investigations were carried out at the scene of the murder, the police began interviewing Kercherâs friends and acquaintances. Among them were 20-year-old Amanda Knox and her boyfriend, 23-year-old Raffaele Sollecito, the Italian universit...