By Candace Dempsey UPDATE: Trial resumes on September 14th and 15. Other dates scheduled: 18, 19, 25 and 26, and 2 and 3 October.

Not exactly the North Face of the Eiger. Frank Sfarzo, Perugia Shock

Guess what? The window broken at the "house of horrors" on the night Meredith Kercher was murdered in Perugia, Italy, doesn't present the climbing challenge of the Eiger's North Face. No agile person need fear that brick wall. Even the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, wearing slippery street shoes of fine Italian leather, could scale it. We still await proof that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito broke it, to make the homicide look like a botched robbery attempt, allegedly to frame Rudy Guede, already sentenced to 30 years for murder and sexual assault.

Window, Filomena's Room

Defense expert Francesco Pasquali shattered that popular climbing myth in the trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito this weekend. The retired forensics officer Pasquali used a video to demonstrate that a burglar could have thrown a 4 kg. rock through the window from the outside, not from the inside as the prosecution maintains.

Shutters open on Filomena's window

The prosecution pointed out that Pasquali's mockup didn't include the shutters, but conceded they were partially open on the night of the crime. Meaning unlocked, easy to open--maybe one reason this window, although exposed to the street, might have been chosen. The crime could also have been cased beforehand, since an intruder was spotted in the garden of the cottage on two occasions in the weeks leading up to Kercher's brutal stabbing death.

Filomena Room: Note curtains

The prosecution also maintained that gauzy curtains in the room of Filomena Romanelli, one of Meredith's two Italian roommates, would have impeded the shattered glass--if the rock was thrown from outside. But these curtains turned out to be flimsy, merely decorative strips of cloth, not the House of Usher creations discussed in court. Also the crime scene photos show them drawn to one side.

Inner shutters 1

Prosecutors Giuliano Mignini and Manuela Comodi have made much of Filomena Romanelli's testimony, in which she describes finding glass on top of her clothes, meaning the window would have broken after the murder--not before. A detective made the same contention. But crime scene photos do not support this contention. And, in any case, Filomena disturbed the crime scene (through no fault over her own) at least three times. So who could the window climber be? The defense hasn't been shy about pointing to Rudy Guede, an extremely athletic, former semi-pro basketball player who admits that he was in the cottage on the night of the crime. Indeed his bloody fingerprints were found on the crime scene and his DNA discovered on the victim's body and inside it. Sorry, but that needs to be said--and remembered, since his legal team is trying to portray him as a mere bystander.

Rudy Guede has always claimed that Meredith invited him over. That they had hasty, consensual sex and then, while he was on the toilet, someone else murdered Kercher. He then returned to find an Italian man wielding a knife. After a skirmish, the attacker fled. Rudy claimed to have helped Meredith, but too late. By his own admission, he left her lying in a pool of blood and, hours later, went to the Domus disco to dance.

The prosecution hasn't bought major parts of this colorful story. But it does contend that Amanda Knox let Rudy into the room, kicking off a sort of orgy that none of the participants had ever expressed an interest in launching.

In fact Amanda and Raffaele had never even exchanged emails nor phone calls with Rudy. Nor had Rudy ever stepped into their homes, or vice versa. Rudy has attempted to place Amanda, thus far unsuccessfully, in the tale. First he said she wasn't there. There he placed her on the front steps. Then inside quarreling with Meredith. In his latest version she is outside again, fleeing the scene. A view that Rudy claimed he got through Filomena's window (not yet broken, he insisted) as he himself left the house, abandoning the dying Meredith.

Entry window past the gate and above the grating. Frank Sfarzo, Perugia Shock

The defense has made a major attempt to cast Rudy as a small-time thief with a window-breaking modus operandi. Earlier testimony painted him as the person who broke into a lawyers' office in Perugia in October, just weeks before Meredith's death, through a window (see photo). Guede was later caught in Milan with a computer and cellphone stolen from that same office. He claimed he had bought them at the train station in Milan--if so, an amazing coincidence. He later showed up at the lawyers office in full basketball regalia, to claim that he wasn't the thief. A Merlin's bartender has also accused Rudy of breaking into his flat through a window, armed with a knife, to rob him.

Why the need for the window testimony? Even Judge Paolo Micheli, no fan of suspects Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, said that climbing through that window would not require "a Spiderman." This was way back in October 2008, when he sentenced Rudy Guede to 30 years in prison and sent Raffaele and Amanda off to trial:

"In fact, this court believes that to enter that window you would not really need to be Spiderman, as the Tribunale per il Riesame claims in its hypothesis: it requires a man physically agile, as certainly Guede was, and certainly as are the burglars who visit the apartments of people at night."

House of Horrors with Filomena window and parapet

In his decision, Judge Micheli also noted that a burglar could easily throw the rock from the parapet next to the house and then climb up into the window. There was no reason to carry the rock up or throw it from the ground 20 feet below--as the prosecution contends in photo ops.

Meanwhile, and not by coincidence, the owner of the house of horrors has installed bars on Filomena's window in an attempt to rent the pretty little cottage out to new lodgers. This follows a series of break-ins at the cottage this spring, by intruders who seemed determined to demonstrate that it was never the fortress impregnable that the prosecution contended.

If only it had been.

Photos: Lawyer office photo and photo of climbing lawyer. Courtesy of Frank Sfarzo, Perugia Shock Perugia Shock. Copyrighted by author: Candace Dempsey. All rights reserved.

Here's Amanda's testimony in its entirety:

Raffaele's 112 call on November 2, 2007, before Meredith's body was discovered behind a locked door.