Murder Most Wired

A junior at the University of Washington, Knox was raised by her mother, a math tutor. She's friendly, easygoing and studious, according to classmates. Her Facebook pages, where she called herself "Foxy Knoxy," also show her posing like a fashion model or pointing an antique machine gun at the camera and laughing. In one of her short stories on the Web, a young man accused of drugging and raping a girl called "Icky Vicky" tells his brother, "A thing you have to know about chicks is that they don't know what they want."

The latest suspect, 20-year-old Rudy Hermann Guede from the Ivory Coast, had lived in Italy since he was a child. Convicted of drug possession, he was a regular denizen of the student party scene in Perugia. A great deal of forensic evidence links Guede to the room where Kercher died, according to Italian investigators. His fingerprints were on the pillow, his DNA was on her body, and also inside her. (Pathologists believe she'd had consensual sex with him on the day she died.) Guede's bloody fingerprint was found in the bathroom on a fragment of toilet paper.

Guede was also all over the Web, including in a creepy YouTube video making faces and proclaiming, "Oh, mamma … I'm a vampire. I'm Dracula. I'm gonna suck your blood." Soon after the murder, Guede left Perugia, but he kept checking Facebook for messages from friends. The Communications Police arranged for one of those to contact Guede using Skype from their office, and as the two chatted, the cops traced Guede to a computer in D?sseldorf. He is now awaiting extradition from Germany.

Sollecito, who had been dating Knox for a few weeks before the crime, wrote on the Web about his desire for "extreme sex." He posted a picture of himself as a mad doctor, swathed in bandages with a meat cleaver in one hand and a bottle of alcohol in the other. The Italian press has alleged that police found someone had been Googling "bleach" and "blood" from his computer the morning after the murder. But DNA is harder to wash away than people think. And what's on the Web may haunt you forever.

With Jessica Au in London

© 2007