Mez: Don't Open That Door! (3#) -

Andrea Vogt has provided a very meaty dispatch to open the week. She has introduced a whole new set of colorful characters, an intriguing loose end, and some discouraging information about the DNA situation in Italy.

Vogt reports that Italy has not yet reached official certification standards in the field of Forensic DNA, but is lagging behind the European agreement known as "the Prum Convention."

The Intriguing Loose End: a Mafia-connected Neapolitan named Luciano Aviello claims he knows the whereabouts of the murder weapon and Meredith's house keys. Will anyone follow him down that rabbit hole?

Meanwhile, Nick Pisa and others are reporting that the role of Meredith Kercher in the Lifetime Cable TV March offering will be portrayed by Amanda Fernando Stevens. Unfortunately, she appears to be the wrong race. I believe that the part of Kercher should have been portrayed by a Desi actress. Or is Robert Dornhelm trying to whitewash the racial aspect of this situation?

I was quite horrified to see how many emotionally disturbed people responded to John Kercher's heartfelt Op Ed piece recently. Many of the comments were inappropriate and/or out of control. I have never seen anyone in public callously hectoring a bereaved family with such cruelty before.

An ever-expanding body of apocrypha about this case is being posted on the Internet nearly every week by distraught fans of Amanda Knox. What are we to make of it?

The conflation of the real life murder of Meredith Kercher fused together with Hollywood movie tropes familiar from the genre of Teen Slasher movies requires an MiP or Maiden in Peril and a Boogeyman. In this case, the local prosecutor often has been used as the villain. And Amanda Knox has been depicted as the MIP, even though the real life homicide victim was Meredith Kercher.

I believe the origin of this phenomenon may have been the story Amanda Knox told about arriving home to find her front door open and then stripping off all her clothes to take a shower.

Characters in Hollywood movies frequently do things that people in real life would never do. For example: "Don't open that door!" If the movie ingenue would not open the door, that would be the end of that movie. Thus, the ingenue must open the door in order to continue the story.

In real life, when you come home to find your front door open, you would feel violated. In such a state, your reflex reaction would not be to take off all your clothes.

To believe that an ingenue would get naked in that situation would require a suspension of disbelief comparable to that needed for watching a Teen Slasher movie.

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