I met that girl many years ago. I had gone to Seattle to get some foreign language material that wasn't available in Bellingham. I was planning a trip to Denmark and was trying to learn the language. After I purchased my stuff, I took it to a coffee shop so I could look over it before heading back home. She saw my materials on the table and started talking to me. She was very, very nice and enthusiastic and high energy. She told me that she planned to go to Italy to study language and she asked me asked me why I wanted to go to Denmark. She also suggested some famous places to visit while there. She was breathlessly excited when talking about her plans to go to Italy and suggested I go there as well because I am half Italian. She and I talked about Europe and learning foreign languages for about 25 minutes or so. I'm not sure, but I think she may have worked at that coffee shop. Anyway, she seemed very nice. She talked about how much she was going to miss her family and seemed very distressed about missing milestones of younger family members. She seemed like a typical American kid to me, though she was, as I said, very high energy. I used to facilitate a group for ADHD students in college and one of my first impressions of her was that she would have fit in well in that group. She was in motion constantly, even as she sat there chatting with me.
Anyway, I'm just saying, she seemed very nice and very normal to me. I would bet everything I have that she is not guilty. She made some seriously poor judgments, but I think that fear and the lack of a full comprehension of the language made for incredible stress. I have heard that she behaved in a nonchalant manner in the courtroom....but seriously, she was a student of the language, she was not fluent. When I met her, she told me she had a lot to learn still. And even if she had a good handle on the language by then, she certainly wasn't likely to know much about courtroom language which can be hard to understand in your own language, let alone a foreign language. I imagine she was very board sitting there hours on end. I don't know. I think a lot of people are failing to realize she was very young, without her parents, in a foreign country and under stress that most of us can't even comprehend. Bad choices don't equate to murder. I know it happens, and I'm not saying it is impossible. I'm just saying, having chatted with her a little while, it's impossible to wrap my mind around her doing the horrific things she was accused of doing. I can imagine her partying off some of that energy she has...but killing somebody in a brutal rape scene? I seriously, seriously doubt it.