Amanda Knox

I hardly know Amanda Knox - we'd chatted briefly once, in Italian, at a cooking class - but as president of the Seattle-Perugia Sister City Association I'd lived a long time with the drama of her incarceration and under the long arc of her journey from guilt to final innocence.

Seven years and more, time that cast a shadow over a friendship between two cities, time that tested Amanda, her family and friends, in unimaginable ways, time that moved, for those who believed in her innocence, glacially, painfully.

She had written a deeply self-probing book, "Waiting To Be Heard," after her return home to Seattle, after an appeals court had found her innocent, but of course that book could not end the story - the highest court in Italy re-instated her guilt, another appeals court confirmed it, leaving her - all of us really - in a lingering state of limbo, waiting for a final ending, this last spring, in that same high court.

We know the outcome - innocent - but I waited for Amanda's word, an epilogue, a new afterword to her narrative of freedom, prison, and freedom again.

Reading it, just moments ago, three things resound and close this long and traumatic journey:

- how perhaps only the person falsely accused can sum so clearly the reasons for innocence

""None of my DNA was found in my friend Meredith Kercher's bedroom, where she was killed.  The only DNA found, other than Meredith's, belonged to the man convicted of her murder, Rudy Guede.  And his DNA was everywhere in the bedroom.

It is, of course, impossible to selectively clean DNA, which is invisible to the naked eye.  We simply could not have cleaned our DNA and left Guede's and Meredith's behind.  Nor was any other trace of me found at the murder scene, not a single fingerprint, footprint, piece of hair, or drop of blood or saliva.  My innocence and Raffaele's was irrefutable."

- the cruel carelessness of those who judge, and never review their reasons

"A couple of students in one of my large lecture classes at UW posted pictures of me online saying they were in class with a murderer."

- Knox's discovery of The Innocence Project at a 2014 conference, the birth of a commitment to help those who are falsely accused, to pay back the countless world of people who believed in her, and made her own freedom possible

".....I have found my purpose:  to help other innocent people be able to shout, as I did, 'I'm free!' "