SEATTLE - With Amanda Knox’s appeal now underway in Perugia, Italy, a grassroots campaign is ramping up here in the U.S. aimed at changing public perception about her case.
Retired forensics engineer Ron Hendry recently joined the cause. Hendry told KING 5 that he feels so strongly about Knox’s innocence, he flew to Seattle from Texas, where he lives, to explain his analysis of the case in an interview.
Hendry said he was able to obtain actual photos of the murder scene at the cottage in Perugia, Italy and all of the evidence points to a lone killer.
According to Hendry, the pictures don’t support the prosecution’s theory that Amanda Knox, her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito and an Ivory Coast drifter named Rudy Guede, killed Kercher in a drug-fueled sex game.
“She (Kercher) had to be restrained by the person who killed her,” Hendry says.This contradicts what prosecutors told the jury — that Sollecito held down Kercher while Guede tried to sexually assault her and Knox cut her throat because the British girl resisted.
“Two people were involved,” Hendry said. “It was a life and death struggle at the end and the killer was a street fighter-type person who gained control.”
Kercher’s bedroom was small. Hendry said the open space is hardly bigger than a queen-sized bed and if there were four people in the room engaged in a physical struggle, they would have sustained injuries and they would have left their DNA all over the room.
Hendry said it was Rudy Guede who left a bloody footprint in the room, along with his DNA on the victim and on her belongings.
"I believe that he (Guede) felt that his life was over, he was very upset with Meredith Kercher, for causing him to kill her,” he said. “It’s very twisted logic, but this was an act of revenge,” Hendry said.
Hendry believes Guede was burglarizing the cottage and was surprised and angered by Kercher’s presence.
He also said that Amanda Knox was incapable of inflicting the mortal knife wound, which was three inches long and quite deep.
"Basically, it takes someone very strong to do this," he said.
Prosecutors concluded that the break-in was staged and that Knox and Sollecito threw a rock through the window of one of the bedrooms to cover up the murder.
“The biggest blunder that they (police) made in this case is with regard to the break-in. They didn’t investigate it,” Hendry said.
During the trial, it was clear that police and prosecutors didn’t believe that a burglar would try to break into the cottage from a second story window that could be seen from the street above.
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