Kercher’s father relives agony of identifying body

The father of murdered student Meredith Kercher has relived the agonising moment when he travelled to Italy to identify his daughter’s body.

John Kercher travelled to Perugia with his ex-wife Arline and their daughter Stephanie to see Meredith’s body in the morgue after her violent murder.

In a new book about the killing that robbed him of his young daughter, Kercher admits he was unable to look at his daughter for a final time for fear he would lose his “laughing and happy” final memory of her.

“Nothing can prepare you for what it is like to have to travel to a foreign country to identify the body of your daughter,” he writes in Meredith: Our Daughter’s Murder And The Heartbreaking Quest For The Truth, which has been serialised in the Mail on Sunday.

“Now little more than two months since she had first moved to the city, we were approaching it for the first time and she was never coming home.

“It was time to see my daughter. But I could not face going in. The brutal reality of having to see what had been done to Meredith had not really hit home.

“I could go no further. For me it would have put a full stop on my memories.

“In the morgue, standing over her body, Arline had said: ‘Your father’s come all this way out here to see you, but doesn’t feel he can.’ Then she had smiled, for the last time at our daughter. ‘But,’ she had whispered, ‘you know what your father’s like’...”

Kercher’s account comes six months after Amanda Knox walked free from prison in Italy after being acquitted of the crime.

University of Leeds exchange student Meredith Kercher, from Coulsdon in Surrey, was found dead on Nov 2, 2007, in her bedroom at the house in the Umbrian hilltop city she shared with Knox and others. Her throat had been slit and her semi-naked body was partially covered by a duvet.

Kercher recalled the last time he saw his daughter, two weeks before her murder. “She talked eagerly about Perugia,” he said. “She said she was trying to buy a duvet for her bed but nobody seemed to know where she could find one.

“I remember her saying she was determined to track one down. That this should be the duvet beneath which her body would be found is something that will always haunt me.”

Knox was sentenced to 26 years’ imprisonment and her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito to 25, but both were acquitted on appeal last October.

“With Knox and Sollecito now free, we find that we are still waiting for justice for our daughter and sister, and have to face up to the possibility that we might never have a satisfactory picture of what unfolded in Perugia on that terrible November night,” Kercher writes.