Meredith Kercher murder case timeline

This page provides a brief timeline of the murder case. The first section provides some details of the murder discovery and the initial police investigations, while the later section provides summaries of the subsequent trials. There are several important points to note:

Contrary to what was repeatedly reported in the media, police investigations did not last for only a few days. Police investigations continued for eight months, from before the cautionary arrests in early November 2007 up to June 2008. In fact police investigations and evidentiary hearings happened after the cautionary arrests were confirmed by the Italian Supreme Court in early April 2008. Notably, prosecutors did not finalize charges until after the investigations were complete, in July 2008. This is when the investigation phase officially ended. The arrests made were precautionary, primarily to prevent flight risks by Knox and (at the time of the arrests) Lumumba.

The Micheli trial played a critical role in the proceedings, though it has been often overlooked in media reports and books. The trial had a dual purpose. It acted as Guede's primary murder trial and also as a preliminary hearing for the murder charge evidence against Knox and Sollecito, a precursor to their main trial. The reason it acted as Guede's murder trial is because Guede's defense team asked for a fast track judicial process at the beginning of the trial. Otherwise, this would have been a preliminary hearing trial for Guede as well.
Judge Micheli's sentence notes that all three defendants acted together in the murder of Meredith Kercher. His motivation report is well worth reading, since it is the first court motivation report that looks at most of the evidence gathered by the police. The previous court motivation reports of the cautionary arrest proceedings only looked at some parts of the evidence, because investigations were still ongoing and not all final reports had been released.

Finally, it is very important to note the large number of trials that have occurred in the case. Many think that this was a case where evidence was meager and the Italian courts were equally divided about whether Knox and Sollecito participated in the murder of Meredith Kercher. But as can be seen below, many judges weighed the evidence against the defendants and found the evidence preponderant. The judges who found the evidence valid enough to tie all three defendants to the murder include: the preliminary hearing judge (Claudia Matteini); two different cautionary arrest appeal courts; two different Italian Supreme Courts that confirmed the cautionary arrests; the Micheli court; Guede's appeals court and the Italian Supreme Court judges ruling on his appeals; the Massei court, the 2013 Italian Supreme Court which annulled the first appeals court decision for Knox and Sollecito, and finally the second appeals court in Florence, also for Knox and Sollecito.
Only two courts (the first appeals court in Perugia and the final Italian Supreme Court) found the evidence contradictory or insufficient. In both these cases, the trials were presided by judges with primarily civil case experience, not with violent crime experience. And in both cases, the judges only considered a limited part of the evidence, not all of it.
So in reality the vast majority of the Italian judges who considered the case found the evidence valid enough to believe that Knox and Sollecito had also participated in the murder. The first appeals court (whose trial sentence was annulled,) and the final Supreme Court ruling, are outliers in the case.

A more detailed chronology of the murder case can be seen from the chronological listing of the file library here. A PDF of this table can be found in this document.

• 2019-09-15-case-timeline.pdf