Customer Reviews

Angel Face: Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(32)

 

 

I honestly never heard of Amanda Knox until a couple months ago but this case intrigued me. Unfortunately there is a lot of heated public disagreements over this case and as such just about all of the media surrounding it is biased in one way or another. Naturally the several books written on the case so far are also biased, each in their own way. So in my quest to gather as many facts about the case as possible I decided to just read several of the books and then hope to find the truth somewhere in the middle. I started with Murder in Italy and followed it up with this book, Angel Face by Barbie Nadeau. I found the two books to be completely different in bias, style, and substance.

First off I must warn, if you are looking to read only one book on the Amanda Knox case then I would steer you far away from Nadeau's book. The length of the book will surely attract casual readers but unfortunately the title is very misleading when it says "True Story." Here is why.

1. It's very short clocking in at a scant 200 pages typeset with an eye friendly 12 maybe 14 point font and double spaced. It reminds me of a Harry Potter book or any mid level high school history essay. It could probably be 60 pages long if you dropped the spacing, font size, and removed a lot of the filler unrelated to the case. In other words the book just isn't long enough to give a complete overview of this complex case.

2. The style is entirely Anecdotal. Murder in Italy is a dense read full of tons of facts, sources, reprints of documents, etc, whereas Nedeau's is more like she is sitting in your room just telling you her take on the case real quick and why she thinks Knox is guilty. Because of this style Nadeau offers very little in the way of citations and sources of her material. She does use quite a few quotes in her narrative but they are scattered and lack any sourcing. Worse, she often emphasizes some facts to mislead or flat out omits some key facts you otherwise wouldn't know if you hadn't read other material. There is no bibliography. Nadeau merely just lauds herself as being an expert supposedly because she read all the 10,000 pages of court documents and spent every day in court. Unfortunately when one cross-references Nadeau's anecdote with the case facts found in other books you will find numerous conflicts, contradictions, misleading statements, omissions, etc.

The result is that Nadeau's book is simply her own opinion of the case, rather than an objective look at the truth of the case which the title implies. There is nothing wrong with opinion analysis just realize that if you are unfamiliar with the case you are getting only the selected facts Nadeau chooses to give you and everything is loaded so you will see the case only in the way that supports her theory.

The only value I found in Nadeau's book was that when read in conjunction with Murder in Italy I was able to get a better picture of some of the fuzzier moments of the case. Murder in Italy is also biased, this time in favor of Knox, but the bias is different. Bremmer, in her book, adds opinionated emphasis to her account however she rarely seems to omit facts or evidence the way Nadeau does. However because her focus was on other areas of the case, she does make some small omissions of early case details. Nadeau's book helps it grasping those with a clearer issue.

But on it's own Nadeau's book is such a mess of error's, confusing contradiction's, and way too many personal rants of how much she hate's the defendant's family. Nadeau makes numerous types of mistakes ranging from contradiction to flat out petty misleading statements.

Examples:

-In the opening pages Nadeau points out that Knox's only previous run in with the law was an "Arrest for a Seattle noise violation" for a party she threw. This is petty because Knox (and pretty much anyone else in America) wasn't "arrested". She was handed a citation which is a fine no different than a parking ticket. Use of the term "arrested" misleads the reader into thinking it was something far more serious than some loud teenagers in a suburban neighborhood.

-As Nadeau quickly runs the reader through the events of the case, she is extremely selective in her presentation of facts. This has an effect of leading the reader to doubt Knox and Solecito before she has even gotten to the murder. One point that confused me was Nadeau purposely mentions a phone call from Solecito's father to his apartment at 8:40pm on the night of the murder which as she puts it, "was not answered." This implies that Knox and Solecito were not at his apartment when they said they were. A big problem is that Nadeau has neglected to report that an eyewitness testified that she spoke directly to Knox at Solecito's apartment at 8:45 pm the same night. You would never know this if you only listen to Nadeau. This gets confusing later on though because Nadeau (as did the Prosecution) acknowledges that Knox and Solecito probably were at his apartment and didn't leave until well after 9 pm. This begs the question, why mislead and cast doubt on the defendants whereabouts at 8:40 pm if it's immaterial to the case entirely? Simple, if the reader believes that the defendants lied about something as harmless as where they were at 8:40pm then they would easily lie about where they were later on. The big problem is that Knox and Solecito didn't lie and Nadeau should KNOW this if she had read all the facts of the case. Either she didn't know of this fact or more likely she is misleading the reader.

-The famous double DNA knife is another example of confusing contradiction. Nadeau introduces the reader to the knife by lauding the work of the DNA specialist and just about everything the knife represented. She seems quite confident the knife is an indication of guilt. However, in later chapters, Nadeau acknowledges that there were technical problems with the DNA testing. (This is a theme in the book where whenever Nadeau seems to mention any fact or argument favoring the defense (of which there are few), she does so by making it appear that it's all a legal technicality, not some indication of innocence.) She also acknowledges that the prosecutions own forensic experts who studied the wounds, claimed the kitchen knife was "incompatible" with the main wound and "impossible" for the other wounds. This meant that the prosecutions own investigators didn't believe the knife had anything to do with the crime. Well, Nadeau changes her tone her and begins describing the knife as worthless evidence for the prosecution and she goes on to attack the defense and the US media as though they spent way too much time focusing on it. In other words, Nadeau, is implying that the knife was not a big part of the case. However, this is not entirely true. The Prosecution may have backed off the knife a bit but they never conceded it was not the murder weapon and they referenced it throughout the case. Also, in Nadeau's own publicity appearance for THIS BOOK, she responds to a question about the lack of DNA evidence against Knox in the case saying, "It's a myth that there is no DNA evidence. The double DNA is knife is a key piece of evidence against Knox." Why would she say the knife is important when she is pushing her book in which she writes the knife was useless. Very confusing.

-More confusion comes from her relationship with the media in general. Nadeau goes to great lengths to point out that the Knox family would only give exclusives to reporters who were favorable to them. As such Nadeau believes this led to a mass separation of the media and makes little indictment of the circus it was to begin with. Furthermore it was ironic because she also admits that the Prosecution used the media in EXACTLY the same manner. Nadeau flaunts her close personal relationships with the lead prosecutor as well as many other characters from the Prosecutions side. From this she claims she had unlimited access to the Prosecutor's office. She also spends many pages documenting how the Knox family publicity machine was mean to her, ironically giving her motive to write an Anti-Knox book. What Nadeau never seems to realize is that this candid reporting hurts her credibility. Her being so close to the Prosecution just lumps her in with the other reporters who were being spoon fed by one side or the other. Nadeau clearly didn't want to "bite the hand that fed her." This is clear when she attempts to humanize Mignini, the lead prosecutor that has become such a villain in the American press. Nadeau claims he is not the Monster that Knox or Douglas Preston make him out to be but that he isn't a Saint either. She even cracks a joke that he has a quirk that causes him to suspect Satanism as the root cause of crime a little too often. I was completely floored by this. The Defense argued that Mignini's obsession with Satanic cults drove him to misunderstand the case and mislead investigators down the wrong path, ultimately to the wild assumptions about Knox and Solecito. Instead Nadeau turns the tables, insisting that this was unfair to the Prosecutor YET she completely agrees he is oddly over obsessed with Satanic cults. Nadeau is inadvertently confirming the Defenses case.

There are a lot more examples of Nadeau's misleading statements and contradictions. She dedicates an entire chapter to her own hypothesis of the murder. This hypothesis contains so many baseless claims and assertions as well as inaccuracies it becomes clear to me Nadeau is so biased she is willing to spread false information.

For instance she admits that Knox and Solecito left his place after 9 pm but she never acknowledges why she knows this or that Solecito was believed to shower at his place (she argues he showers at Knox's later on even though the witness believed he was in the shower when she was at his apartment door). She believes that Knox and Solecito had a pre-arranged meeting with Rudy Guede (the third suspect) even though there is no evidence of any contact between them. Guede had no phone and there is no e-mail evidence. Also, prosecution witness testimony delivered no relationship between the three. Guede claimed he had never met Solecito. In fact Nadeau makes a lot of odd comments about Guede. First she implies that the US press assault of Guede is fueled by racism rather than the sheer volume of evidence against him. Nadeau seems to accept Guede's ever changing testimony of events as canon yet points out his lies when it suits her. The Defense argued that in several of Guede's earliest statements, Rudy said that Knox was not at the house (when he was) when Kercher was killed. He also claimed he had never met Solecito before at all. Therefore the defense argued that Guede only changed his story later on to try and deflect guilt from himself and onto innocent defendants. However Nadeau argues that Guede lied in the early statement about killing Kercher. He said he was there but someone else killed her. So if he lied about not killing Kercher than he obviously would lie about everything else. This is odd from Nadeau because she is being selective of when to believe a witness. Instead Nadeau seems to pity Guede and explicitly believes him when he says he did not kill Meredith and that the Knox family is being insensitive to the man when they claim he was the sole killer.

Much like with the homeless man who testified to seeing Knox and Solecito standing outside the flat "casing it." This man claimed he saw the two hanging around outside away from the house for close to two hours. This man was considered a "super-witness" even though he accidentally gave Knox and Solecito an alibi. Nadeau admits this. The forensic team determined Kercher died at about 9:30pm. This was a problem for the Prosecution because it's hard to put Knox and Solecito at the scene at that time. Remember Nadeau didn't tell you about the woman who spoke to Knox at Solecito's apartment and that she appeared sober and normal at 8:45pm. It was hard to believe that the two could have left after that, walked to the house, met with Guede and Kercher, and done enough drugs and alcohol to get enraged enough to kill Kercher only 45 minutes later. This homeless man made this impossible as he claimed the pair were outside for nearly 2 hours leading up to 11pm. So the Prosecution changed their theory and the time of death to after 11pm even though there was no science behind that. But again Nadeau isn't giving you all of the evidence. On top of the homeless man never seeing Guede that night, he also reported seeing them and other kids carrying masks. This testimony confused the situation because it is very possible the man was recalling Halloween night, not the night of the murder. Instead Nadeau never brings it up. She states the testimony as matter of fact.

She also makes big mistakes. 1. She claims that Knox and Solecito made bloody footprints on the floor of the apartment which they cleaned up. She said that Luminol detected these. However, she does not mention that Luminol found no footprints to match Knox in Kercher's bedroom, nor does she mention that all of the foot prints in the hallway tested negative for blood. In other words Nadeau is either guessing or lying about what made the footprints. The police couldn't find blood so it's possible the prints were old prints made when they mopped the floors on some previous occasion. Even the prosecution didn't argue the prints were made in blood, they only tried to use them as evidence of a cleanup. 2. She claims that the lack of Knox's fingerprints, even in her own bedroom was suspicious and proves that a cleanup took place. This is the Prosecution's line flat out but the cross examination shows something kind of silly. The police never bothered to test Knox's room for fingerprints at all, and in her bathroom they found many smudged prints. Why would Nadeau cite this as evidence when she should know that no tests were done? 3. She claims there was a footprint found on a pillowcase made in blood that was a match to Knox's foot. Again Nadeau ignores the defenses cross that the print is actually a partial print that appears to match Guede's heel. In fact Nadeau seems to present all of the footprint evidence as inconclusive even though it was solid in convicting Guede.

Sometimes Nadeau seems downright naive. She constantly refers to a beverage called Hard A or Whiskey and Schnapps mixed together as a "Toxic drink." I have certainly drank much crazier concoctions than that. Whats more is though that even through all of the statements and testimonies made about the main players indicate Knox never used drugs harder than pot, never drank very much, and most importantly, never fought with Kercher, Nadeau ignores it all. She hypothesizes that in just under an hour or so, Knox and Solecito were able to meet up with Guede, then with Kercher, and then do so much heroine and acid (no evidence of these drugs just her guess) mixed with hard alcohol (again no evidence), all just before they spontaneously decided to have a threesome with Guede (a person whom the evidence shows was a stranger.). This kind of cuts to the root problems of the case in general I think for those who feel Knox is innocent. The evidence is too sparse and the only way to think Knox was doing hard drugs, having threesomes, and brandishing knives, is to destroy her character. Nadeau works that angle very hard. She paints Knox as a hard drinker even though no witnesses testified to it. She also paints her relationship with other men as being outrageous or extreme. She uses petty statements pulled from social networking sites as examples of the couples "extreme behavior" like dressing up in a surgeons costume for a Halloween party and saying you are a little bit "crazy." It's hard for me to see all this from Nadeau. Either she is very closeted or just being overtly naive.

Etc etc. In the end I found the book to possess very little value. It grabs 2 stars because I found it did carry some value when matched with Murder in Italy but on it's own I rate the book 1 star and recommend it to only those willing to read other books about the case. Nadeau is just too far biased for the title of this book to be accurate. She clearly has an axe to grind with the Knox family and she almost admits in her own book that the Knox family alone was probably enough to convict Amanda. The book is poorly written, is un-sourced, too short, too selective, and poorly edited for mistakes.

The title should read: A short essay on why Barbie Nadeau thinks Amanda Knox is guilty.

THIS BOOK IS LIBELLOUS, IN ITS TITLE AND CONTENTS. IT SHOULD BE WITHDRAWN IMMEDIATELY.

This book is tabloid journalism. It is apparent that there is no in depth research behind the book. But there is a lot of nonsense in it. The most notable is the fantasy scenario that the author proposes for the events which occurred on the night of the murder. There is not a shred of evidence for this fantasy and it does harm to the cause of unravelling the truth of the sorry affair.

It is clear to me that a miscarriage of justice has occurred, and that it is due to some extent to tabloid journalism such as this book represents.

The title of this book is most misleading.

I recommend considering a different view, by reading at least one of the following:- 'Injustice in Perugia' by Bruce Fisher, 'Murder in Italy' by Candace Dempsey, and 'The Monster of Perugia - The Framing of Amanda Knox' by Mark Waterbury.

As a professional historical researcher, I can tell you that this book is a joke and should be given no more credit than a tabloid. The author is beyond bias. Barbie has written this book to be one sided and furthers her anti-Amanda sentiment. She blatantly ignored evident showing that Amanda may not have taken part in the murder. This "book" can best be described as a tabloid. If you know all the facts about the case then read the books..... its good for a laugh and it only costs 1.99 now. However, if you know little about the case then DO NOT rely on this terrible excuse for a book as the truth. Additionally, most of the things Barbie claims as FACTS in this book have been proved otherwise in Amanda Knox's appeal.

This book is utter tabloid rubbish. The author has already made up her mind what the story is before she investigates anything and then selectively uses the facts to "prove" her case, leaving out as much as she includes. Anybody who has done the least bit of research about this case knows Amanda Knox and her boyfriend are probably innocent and the Italian police and justice system are just as corrupt/incompetent as the media has recently, not in 2007, reported.

The book isn't particularly well written either.

Buy this book if you are into sensational crime "fiction."

I think the title reflects very well that the book is worth only as much as most of the sensational media coverage in the beginning of the case, which seemed like a modern witch hunt needing not facts and evidence but just believing.
As a geneticist I was much more impressed by the detailed review of the forensics in M. Waterbury's blog... quite shocking that scientists in basic research seem to have to work more accurate (e.g. using controls) to simply publish an article in a scientific journal then those examining so-called "evidence" in a murder case!?

It must be noted that the Italian appeals court has ruled that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are actually innocent -- not just not proven guilty -- of the terrible crimes falsely attributed to them and sent them home. The author of this book has swallowed and perpetuated the prosecution's deliberate lies, misrepresentations and fraud. Meredith Kercher was murdered by Rudy Guede, a known street criminal, after she caught him burglarizing her house. Guede's DNA and fingerprints were found all over the crime scene, and he was caught on a train fleeing the country. He was convicted and sent to prison before Knox's first trial. Unlike the delusional author of this book, no one who has studied this case could conclude anything but this: Two naive college students who trusted the cops were railroaded by a malevolent prosecutor who himself was convicted of criminal abuse of office. This book is a pack of lies.

Will there be a 2nd edition of this fiction after Ms. Nadeau's "investigative report" has been proven wrong? Will Ms. Nadeau accept that she's been wrong all along, and has been nothing but a mouthpiece for that piece of work, the Monster of Perugia Giuliano Mignini? How much money has Ms Nadeau made from the misfortune of others?

A horrible book by a horrible human being.

I absolutely agree with the other readers that the author's biases totally interfere with her credibility. I just finished "Murder in Italy" which I highly recommend as opposed to this offensive portrayal of a very sensitive case.

This book has all the earmarks of a rush job to capitalize on the sensationalism of this murder and the trial. The author's slant is obvious as well. Not a very objective account.

I had hoped that this book by Barbie Nadeau would fill in a lot that I didn't know about the Amanda Knox case. The author supposedly attended the complete trial, read through 10,000 pages of court records, and being an Italian journalist, had access to key people close to the trial. Although she had close ties to important people in Perugia, prosecutor Mignini being one, this book turned out to be a simplistic hatchet job on Amanda Knox, following closely the storyline of the prosecution. Although she writes that she tries to be impartial, she leaves out key facts and inserts other that aren't true. For example, she states that Amanda's blood was found in several areas mixed with Meredith's blood. Totally untrue. Meredith's blood was found in several places outside of her room and it was mixed with Amanda's DNA, not blood. Since Amanda lived in the same apartment, her DNA would be all over the apartment and any blood there could easily mix with it. In addition, this book is surprising short. The author, normally a travel and food writer, is neither analytical or thorough. And, I don't think she has done anything in this book to risk her close relationship with Mignini and other important figures who work on the side of the prosecution. Don't waste your time reading this book if you want an accurate or complete account of the Amanda Knox case.