Kriti Mehrotra
As a drama delving deep into the 2007 homicide of British exchange student Meredith Kreacher in Italy and how her roommate Amanda Knox was falsely convicted of it, Hulu’s ‘The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox’ is unlike any other. That’s because it chronicles everything that transpired through the eyes of the latter, especially as it is based on her memoir, making us wonder more about the actual killer. Ruby Guede has since been identified, arrested, convicted, and released as Meredith’s killer in Perugia, Italy, and it turns out he never really knew the victim at all.
Rudy Guede Was Someone Meredith Kreacher Had Met Once
Although born on December 26, 1986, in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he came to Perugia, Italy, at the age of five and had been a resident there ever since. He actually came alongside his father, but reports claim he wasn’t the most present, and so he was mostly raised with the help of his school teachers, a local priest, and others. Eventually, when he was around 17, his father returned to their homeland without him, resulting in him being adopted by a wealthy local family. However, by the time 2005 rolled around, they had asked him to leave owing to his alleged criminal involvement.
According to records, Rudy was a thief who had already been charged with breaking into a lawyer’s office through a second-floor window, a local flat with a knife to burgle the place, and more. In fact, on October 27, 2007, mere days before the incident, he was arrested in Milan for breaking into a nursery school and stealing a knife from the school kitchen. On the night of November 1, 2007, though, he allegedly went to a nightclub and stayed there until 4:30 am, only to do that again the following evening, too, before flying to Germany.
As per reports, Rudy had no direct connection to Meredith, but he had come across her through the young men who lived in the apartment below hers – her boyfriend and his friends. They had met him while playing basketball in the evenings, only to invite him over to hang out and relax, only for him to act strange and then be found sitting asleep on the unflushed toilet, which was full of feces. When Meredit’s remains were recovered, there were feces in her bathroom too. In the end, though, he was connected to her murder through DNA evidence because it was his blood and footprints that were recovered from the crime scene, even though he never really knew the victim.
Like Meredith Kreacher, Amanda Knox Did Not Personally Know Rudy Guede
While prosecutors claimed that Amanda and her then-boyfriend met Rudy at the club before they went back to her place and killed her roommate during some kind of revenge sex game, she has always maintained her innocence. She was ultimately acquitted and exonerated, but the charges and conviction of murder and a 16-year prison sentence have always held for Rudy despite his appeals. He was initially arrested in Germany and extradited from there based on the DNA evidence, but it was only when Amanda was running through the callers at her home that she remembered him from the first time, as no one more than someone she had met through the neighbors.
“I’d met him only briefly,” Amanda has since penned in her book ‘Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir.’ “I said, ‘Oh, and there’s this guy — I don’t know his name or his number — all I know is that he plays basketball with the guys downstairs. They introduced Meredith and me to him in Piazza IV Novembre. We all walked to the villa together, and then Meredith and I went to their apartment for a few minutes.” She had met with Rudy, they had smoked pot, and they parted ways. She only saw him “just one time after that. He’d shown up at Le Chic, and I had taken his drink order. Those few words were the only ones we ever exchanged.”
Amanda has always maintained this narrative, but it was believed to be a lie by the Italian authorities in 2007, leading to her arrest for Meredith’s murder. It was after her arrest that he was identified with fingerprints and DNA evidence – his information was on file owing to his criminal history and the fact that he was an immigrant with a green card. In the end, though, while the former has been exonerated, the latter was convicted for 30 years, which was eventually cut down to a final sentence of 16 years. He was granted day release from the prison in 2017 to complete a Master’s degree in Sociology before being released on November 12, 2021, for good. However, in 2024, he was under “special surveillance” by the authorities for allegedly abusing an ex-girlfriend.
Read More: Ginevra Ferrari and Valentina Greco: Are They Based on Real Detectives? Where Are They Now?
