The "purchase of cleaning products"
The "clean up" was a story fed to the media by Guiliano Mignini. It turned out to be a complete fabrication. But prosecutor Mignini succeeded in making the myth stick in the minds of both the public, and the media.
The story given to the Press began with Amanda being seen waiting outside a shop, the morning after Meredith was murdered, supposedly waiting to buy bleach. Mignini also told the Press that the Police had receipts showing that Amanda bought bleach. Many of the myths about the whole case can be traced back to the Mail On Sunday. However, the story about the clean up and the bleach receipts were reported on 19 November 2007, by Richard Owen in The Times. This gave it an apparent veneer of credibility. The report repeated specific details, namely:
(1) that police had found receipts for bleach dated the morning after the murder, and
(2) that the purchase was made at 8:30am, and
(3) that a second purchase was made at 9:15am.
This all proved to be a total fabrication. At the Trial, it turned out that the police had:
(1) no witnesses, and
(2) no receipts.
Because the story had appeared in The Times, other newspapers felt confident about repeating it. Within a few days of 19 November 2007, most of the UK Press had reproduced the story that there had been an attempted clean up. Prosecutor Mignini's misinformation machine had succeeded. Even when, at Trial, the story was exposed as untrue, the world, including much of the Press, could still not clear their heads of the story that there had been a clean up. In truth, Mignini had invented the whole story. It was a complete fabrication.
In the meantime, on 25 November 2007, again in The Times, Richard Owen quoted a " Police source" as saying that the house, "appeared to have been thoroughly cleaned with bleach."
As his own lies started to unravel through lack of evidence, Mignini started to embellish with wild abandon. Remember that, by this time, Mignini's vivid and lurid imagination was already dreaming up the bizarre notion that the crime had involved, as so famously quoted, a "sex game gone wrong". He said at a Press conference that, when the Postal Police arrived at the house, Amanda and Raffaele were standing on the porch with "a mop, a bucket, and some bleach". This was already known to be untrue, because there were plenty of photographs and video taken at the scene. It also contradicted the description of the scene given at earlier Press conferences. But the Press were so drawn by the "clean up" story that the mop and bucket myth was also widely reported.
Then Mignini told the press that Amanda had used the (imaginary) bleach to "attempt to clean her finger prints from the crime scene". Mignini stated: "It is reasonable to hypothesise" (aah, that word!) that "she felt the need to eliminate the traces of her presence from the apartment in which she lived." Three things here:
(1) it was not "reasonable" to suggest that Amanda hoped to remove all traces of ever having been in her own apartment. It was a patently absurd suggestion.
(2) the word "hypothesise", which was used again and again by Mignini throughout the investigation and the Trial. The word "hypothesise" meant ... "we have no evidence". The other dangerous phrase repeatedly used by Mignini, in this and in other Trials that he conducted, was that "evidence" was "not inconsistent with" his theory". Think about that phrase! It means ... "The evidence we have does not support our theory. At best, it doesn't completely disprove it". How strong is such evidence? By was of illustration, finding a banana skin somewhere in Perugia would be "not inconsistent" with you or I having flown to Italy and murdered Meredith, because we all eat bananas.
(continued ...)