Seattle author Candace Dempsey is still trying to sleep off the jet lag from her latest trip to Italy while also providing interviews with international media and finishing the epilogue to her 2010 book, Murder in Italy: The Shocking Slaying of a British Student, the Accused American Girl, and an International Scandal. Dempsey was in court last week when Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were acquitted of the 2007 murder of Knox’s roommate Meredith Kercher. In her book, Dempsey predicted that the exchange student from Seattle would go free if the judge threw out DNA evidence, which experts said was mishandled.
Dempsey says she was sitting close to Knox’s family when the judge read his verdict. “I witnessed the joy of their families,” Dempsey says. “I could see their tears and feel their happiness. I’m absolutely thrilled.”
As an Italian-Amercan, Dempsey says she couldn’t be prouder. “I always said the Italians would do the right thing in the end,” she says. “Italians believe in science. We believe in education. Yes, we are noisy. We yell and wave our hands. But in the end, we do the right thing.”
Dempsey has until tonight to finish the epilogue for Murder in Italy, which has seen an upswing in sales during the last week and is headed for a reprint.
Dempsey is also working on a much quieter book project, I Dream of Italy, about a train ride train ride through Southern Italy, from Rome to Sicily. “It will be a single adventure, deepened with memories of my Italian-American childhood and many years of traveling to see my family and exploring that incredibly beautiful, misunderstood, mysterious place called the Mezzogiorno—land of the midday sun.”
An essay she wrote for NWBL last year, Reporting from the Most Famous House in Italy, received more comments than anything else we’ve published.