Meredith Kercher

Case background and investigation

Meredith Susanna Cara Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon in Surrey, was a University of Leeds student spending an exchange year in Perugia, Italy. She shared an upstairs flat at Via della Pergola 7 with American student Amanda Knox and two Italian women. According to Channel 4 News and other reports, she was sexually assaulted and stabbed in her bedroom on the night of November 1, 2007. Her body was found the following day; the fatal injury was a wound to the neck.

On November 6, 2007, Italian police arrested Knox, her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a bar where Knox worked. Knox had named Lumumba during police questioning. He was released on November 20 and was never charged with the killing. Fingerprints in Kercher's bedroom were matched on November 19 to Rudy Guede, a man born in Ivory Coast who lived in Perugia. He was arrested in Germany the next day and returned to Italy.

Guede chose a fast-track trial and was convicted of murder and sexual assault on October 28, 2008, receiving a 30-year sentence that was later reduced to 16 years on appeal. NBC News reported that his DNA was found at the scene. He has denied killing Kercher. He was released in November 2021 after serving about 13 years, according to NBC News and Voice of America.

Knox and Sollecito were tried separately in Perugia from January 2009 and convicted in December 2009, with sentences of 26 and 25 years. An appeal court acquitted them on October 3, 2011, after an independent review questioned the DNA evidence. The Court of Cassation set that acquittal aside on March 26, 2013, and a Florence appeal court convicted them again on January 30, 2014. On March 27, 2015, the Court of Cassation annulled those convictions without ordering a further trial, which ended the murder case against both. They are legally not guilty of the killing.

Knox's separate conviction for falsely accusing Lumumba has followed a different course. In January 2019 the European Court of Human Rights found that her rights had been violated during questioning, because she lacked a lawyer and adequate interpretation. Italian courts reheard the matter; a Florence court convicted her again on June 5, 2024, and the Court of Cassation upheld that conviction on January 23, 2025. The three-year sentence was covered by time she had already spent in custody.

Since his release, Guede has faced unrelated proceedings. In July 2025 a judge in Viterbo ordered him to stand trial on charges of sexual violence, mistreatment and causing injury, based on a complaint by a former partner. His lawyer has said he is innocent. According to Sky TG24, the trial was still hearing witnesses in mid-2026 and no verdict had been given.