There has long been a tendency to blame the misdeeds of the young on the media, especially if the media in question is something revolutionary that has just been invented. In Victorian times, there was much talk of all juvenile delinquency being the direct cause of the "Penny Dreadful" magazine. There had never been such mass literacy before and new methods of setting type and producing newsprint caused a whole new market of lurid cheap booklets aimed at a youth market. Most of them celebrated the triumphs and misdeeds of a fellow called "Jack".

By the same token, in Depression America there was much discussion of the exploits of James Cagney, George Raft and Humphrey Bogart in the talkies playing gangsters. Surely this would lead to crimes by youngsters, copying their film heroes.
As the French say, "The more things change, the more they remain the same", and now we have the Facebook- MySpace murders carried out by a group of foreign exchange students in Perugia, Italy. The accused persons supposedly posed on their sites wearing death's head masks and carrying guns, which means they should have been arrested straight away for something, or so one would think from following the press coverage of the story.
The murder of Meredith Kercher, stabbed in the neck and brutally attacked sexually, has been described in the media in a very complicated and confusing way. In my experience, it is crimes such as these which are the least complex of all. So far there have been four suspects, Congolese bar owner Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, 38, who seems to have been arrested on the say-so of Amanda Knox, 20, the murdered woman's roomate and who thankfully has been released, Raffaele Sollecito, 23, another patsy of Knox's, and Rudy Hermann Guede, a 20 year old from the Ivory Coast who fled to Germany after the crime and is now awaiting extradition back to Italy.
I have read much blather about this case and why this murder supposedly happened; that the dead girl refused to participate in an orgy and that is why she was killed. Of course this is rank nonsense; she was murdered by Amanda Knox and Rudy Guede for money. Amanda Knox owed Guede money for drugs and Meredith Kercher had just withdrawn a large sum of money from a cash machine to pay rent on the apartment she shared with Knox. The rent was never paid.
I always feel there are two types of murderers; the types where you look at them and say, "There but for the Grace of God go I", like Raffaele Sollecito and the second type, the incomprehensible ones, the evolutionary dead ends like Amanda Knox. Less than 48 hours after she had helped to cut the throat of her roommate, she was in a risque lingerie shop with Sollecito purchasing expensive thong underwear and promising him "wild sex" (probably the money for the scanties came from the money stolen during Kercher's murder).
Of course I am not excusing Sollecito completely; at the very least he helped to clean up after the murder and may have participated in it although he seems to have an alibi from his computer at his apartment being in use during the time the murder was thought to have been committed. I am just saying that we have all been young, immature and infatuated in our lives, and it was his bad fortune to be infatuated with one of the most evil, unfeeling narcissistic murderesses I have seen in years. He still defends her, saying that no woman could have participated in a crime like this. (and brother, is that a naive statement) All Amanda Knox has done from day one is try to pin this crime on her erstwhile friends like Lumumba and Sollecito. One of the more ridiculous claims I have heard in many a year is her assertion that Sollecito committed the crime while she was asleep and then came into her bedroom and wrapped her hand round the knife found at the scene, thus causing her DNA to be on it.
The Amanda Knoxes of this world existed long before Facebook and MySpace and will exist long after the Internet is nothing but a memory. There are two schools of thought on what creates a murderer; the nature school and the nurture school. The nurture school is more mainstream; Ted Bundy was illegitimate; Jeff Dahmer's parents were divorced; "Son of Sam" couldn't find a girlfriend. Well, when one thinks of the amount of people one has known in one's life who have had things similar or even worse happen to them and yet managed to stagger through life without murdering anyone at all, one has to give the nature school serious thought. Amanda Knox was created, for some odd reason, to kill people. Let's hope that for the next twenty years or so locked up in an Italian prison she never gets another chance.