[By Katie Crouch - Slate Magazine]

This summer, I followed my boyfriend to Italy. He had received a fellowship, the sort where you live in a castle and are served prosecco while you think brilliant thoughts. Our daughter and I trailed after him, eating his leftover shaved ham (very delicious) and attending intimidating dinners. One night, in the garden of a local restaurant, after some lemon liqueur that had the same effect on my conversational skills as grain alcohol, I piped up to ask what the table thought of "the Amanda Knox thing."

There was a flicker of amusement among the international crowd. "It was a Masonic ritual, I heard," someone from Holland said. Another, a painter from Kenya: "She got hysterical and lost her mind. Don't all American girls abroad get hysterical?" "Sex, sex, sex," a German videographer added. "You know how it can be … between roommates … dirty dishes and things. …" This went on until my toddler passed out in a rose bed. Most of the table concluded that Knox was guilty. Certainly, it was the most fun theory.

In case you aren't, like myself, a follower of sensational stories: An American girl, Amanda Knox, and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were sentenced to 26 and 25 years of jail, respectively, for the murder of a fellow student from Britain, Meredith Kercher, in 2007. Another man, Rudy Guede, was convicted of murder and sexual assault in a separate trial, after his DNA was found inside the victim, under her fingernails, and in the victim's smeared blood. Guede, a small-time drug dealer who was born in the Ivory Coast but raised in Perugia, was sentenced to 30 years. After naming Knox and Sollecito as co-killers, Guede's time was reduced to 16 years. During the trial, Knox and Sollecito were accused of planning and carrying out a sex crime that ended in the slow sawing open of the victim's throat. The jury, made up of citizens of Perugia , bought it. Read More;