Meredith Kercher’s killer to complete sentence doing community service

Rudy Guede, the only person definitively convicted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, has been granted permission by an Italian court to finish the rest of his sentence doing community service.

Guede, 34, was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2008. Kercher, a 21-year-old student from Coulsdon, Surrey, was murdered in her home in the university town of Perugia in November 2007. Her body was found in her bedroom, partly undressed with multiple stab wounds. She had also been sexually assaulted.

The convictions of two other suspects, Amanda Knox, an American student who shared the house with Kercher, and her Italian former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were overturned.

Guede had already been given partial prison release in 2017 and until the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic had been working in the library of a criminology centre in the Lazio town of Viterbo. Umbria24 reported that the centre closed because of the pandemic and that Guede then began working as a volunteer for the Catholic charity, Caritas. Rome’s surveillance court has now entrusted him to social services in what his lawyer, Fabrizio Ballarini, said was a sign of Guede’s “high level of social integration” and “irreproachable conduct”.

Ballarini told Umbria24 that Guede was also completing a master’s in historical sciences at Roma Tre university. Ballarini said the court’s decision was a “milestone” for Guede, who is “calm and socially well integrated”.

Knox and Sollecito spent four years in prison after initially being convicted of Kercher’s murder. For Knox, three of those years was for a defamation conviction received after she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba, a bar owner, of the crime. Lumumba spent two weeks in jail and was only released after someone came forward with an alibi for him.

Knox and Sollecito were acquitted in 2011 before being convicted again in 2014 by an appeals court in Florence, which ruled that the multiple injuries inflicted on Kercher’s body proved that Guede could not have acted alone. Italy’s highest court overturned the decision in a definitive ruling in 2015, because of what it described as “stunning flaws” in the investigation that led to the convictions of Knox and Sollecito.