three daughters born to Edda Mellas, a mathematics teacher originally from Germany, and Curt Knox, a vice president of finance for Macy's. Knox and her sisters were raised in West Seattle. Her parents divorced when she was 10 years old, after which her mother remarried to Chris Mellas, an information technology consultant. Knox first travelled to Italy on a family holiday at the age of 15. During that first trip to Italy, she visited Rome, Pisa, the Amalfi Coast, and the ruins of Pompeii. Upon reading Under the Tuscan Sun, which was given to her by her mother, Amanda's interest in the country increased. Knox graduated from the Seattle Preparatory School in 2005 and then studied linguistics at the University of Washington. In 2007, she made the dean's list at the university. She worked at part-time jobs to fund an academic year in Italy. Relatives described the 20-year-old Knox as outgoing but unwary. Her stepfather had strong reservations about her going to Italy that year, as he felt she was still too naïve. Italy Perugia background Knox had come to Perugia for its universities and because it had fewer tourists than Florence, a more popular destination for foreign students. The city had reportedly not had a murder for 20 years, but its prosecutors had been responsible for Italy's most controversial murder cases. A charge originated by Perugia prosecutors resulted in the 2002 conviction of former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti for ordering the murder of journalist Carmine Pecorelli, and led to complaints that the justice system had "gone mad". The Supreme Court took the unusual step of definitively acquitting Andreotti the next year. In early 2002, Perugia prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, who enjoyed taking a detective-like role and was later to be in charge of the Kercher investigation, arraigned members of a respectable Masonic lodge for an alleged conspiracy. Mignini reportedly based the case on a theory involving serial killings and Satanic rites. Mignini investigated fellow prosecutors for complicity in the supposed plot and appealed dismissals of the charges; there were no convictions in the case, which finally ended in 2010. According to a scholar who researched comparative law in Italy, selective changes to the Italian legal system left it unable to cope when a prosecutor with Mignini's American-style adversarial approach used his powers to the fullest. Via della Pergola 7 In Perugia, Knox lived in a four-bedroom, ground-floor apartment at Via