Rudy Guede is the only person ever definitively convicted for the death of Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student who died in the Umbrian city of Perugia on November 1, 2007. He was 20 years old that night. Three weeks later he was arrested in Germany on an Italian warrant, and within a year a judge in Perugia, sitting behind closed doors in the fast-track procedure Guede himself had chosen, sentenced him to 30 years. An appeal court cut the term to 16 years in December 2009, and on December 16, 2010, the Corte di Cassazione, Italy's highest court, made that sentence final.
What sets the case apart is the shape of the conviction. The courts did not find that Guede acted alone. He was convicted of murder committed in concorso, together with others, and the appeal judges wrote that he had taken part fully in the crime. Two other people were tried for the same death in a separate and far longer case. They were convicted, acquitted, convicted again, and then, on March 27, 2015, definitively acquitted by the Cassazione. Guede's conviction stood. The judgment that bound him to unnamed others stayed on the books while the only others ever charged walked free, and the contradiction has never been resolved in any courtroom.
Guede has always denied killing the victim. He acknowledged that he had been there that night and denied the murder at every stage, from his first days in German custody through his appeals and a failed petition for a new trial. He served most of his term in Lazio, earned two university degrees while in custody, moved through semi-liberty and supervised community work, and left the system on November 23, 2021, a few weeks ahead of schedule, with credit earned for good conduct.
Rudy Hermann Guede was born in the Ivory Coast on December 26, 1986. He came to Umbria as a small child, at about the age of five, and grew up in Perugia, the university city of central Italy. In his teens and early adulthood he lived for a time in other Italian cities, including Lecco, before returning to Perugia.
Basketball was the constant of his youth, and he played as a guard for local teams in the city. By the fall of 2007 he had no steady work. He had held a job on a family-run farm property outside the city and left it in the August before the death.
The victim died in Perugia on the evening of November 1, 2007. In the first weeks of the investigation an American woman who shared the victim's lodgings and that woman's Italian boyfriend were taken into custody. A third man, a local bar owner, was also held for a time and later released.
Guede's name entered the case in the middle of November. Investigators linked him to the killing through evidence they had gathered, and an international arrest warrant was issued in his name. The prosecution's position, as it stood at that point, was that he had taken part in the killing together with others, and the charges it named were aggravated murder in concorso and violenza sessuale. The Perugia police chief released his photographs to the public on November 19. By then Guede had left Italy.
On November 20, 2007, German police arrested Guede. He was held in Germany while the extradition went forward. The prosecutor's office in Koblenz handled the case on the German side, and in early December it announced that Guede had been moved to Frankfurt and handed over to the Italian authorities. He was returned to Perugia, where he would stay in custody for almost a year before any court decided his case.
From the beginning he gave investigators an account that placed him in Perugia with the victim that evening but denied any part in the death. He acknowledged that he had been there on the evening of November 1. He denied killing the victim, and he denied it again, in substantially the same terms, in every proceeding that followed.
Italian criminal procedure allows a defendant to ask for the rito abbreviato, an abbreviated trial decided by the judge for the preliminary hearing. In return, the defendant receives a reduction of one third of any sentence. Guede was the only one of the three accused to choose it. He asked to be tried separately, and his defense said he feared the two others accused had agreed to blame him.
The rito abbreviato is held in closed session. On October 28, 2008, the judge for the preliminary hearing in Perugia found Guede guilty of the murder and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. The prosecution had asked for life imprisonment. On the same day the judge ordered the two other defendants to stand trial for murder before the Corte d'assise. Their trial was set to begin in December 2008. All three had by then spent close to a year in custody.
Thirty years was already the sentence after the one-third reduction the procedure guaranteed. The judge had declined to grant Guede any mitigating circumstances, and the aggravating circumstances charged by the prosecution were left in full force. That would be the ground on which the next court moved.
Guede appealed. His case went to the Corte d'assise d'appello di Perugia, the appellate jury court. The trial of the two others, running in the same city, ended first. On December 5, 2009, the Corte d'assise convicted both of them of murder and sentenced them to 26 and 25 years.
On December 22, 2009, the appeal court ruled on Guede. It upheld his conviction for the murder and for violenza sessuale, but it granted him the attenuanti generiche, the general mitigating circumstances the first judge had refused. The court weighed them as equivalent to the aggravating circumstances in the case, the violenza sessuale and the futili motivi, the Italian law's term for a trivial motive. With those balanced, the base sentence came to 24 years. The one-third reduction for the rito abbreviato took eight years off that figure. The sentence fell from 30 years to 16.
Guede was in the courtroom when the decision was read. As he left, he told reporters he was not satisfied because he was innocent. His lawyers said the ruling partly restored his standing but still rested on a finding of violenza sessuale and of concorso, both of which the defense contested, and they announced an appeal to the Cassazione.
The appeal court filed its written reasons on March 22, 2010, in a judgment of 56 pages. Its finding on Guede's role was direct. He had, the court wrote, "concorse pienamente," taken part fully, in the murder, and he had "partecipò attivamente a tutte le fasi della progressione criminosa," taken an active part in every stage of the crime as it unfolded.
In Italy a conviction is not final until both levels of appeal have run their course, and Guede's second appeal, to the Corte di Cassazione, was decided in December 2010.
On December 16, 2010, the Cassazione rejected his appeal and confirmed the 16-year sentence. The conviction became final. The court held that Guede had not acted alone but named no accomplices. He stood convicted of omicidio in concorso, murder committed together with persons the judgment did not identify, and of violenza sessuale.
The trial of the two others accused went on for more than five years after Guede's conviction became final. In October 2011 the Perugia appeal court acquitted both of the murder. The case then returned to the Cassazione, which sent it back for a new appeal hearing, and a second appeal court convicted them again. On March 27, 2015, the Cassazione annulled those convictions without remand, ending the case. The court acquitted the two defendants of the murder "per non aver commesso il fatto," for not having committed the act. The written reasons were filed on September 7, 2015.
That ruling left Guede as the only person convicted for the death. The Cassazione's reasons drew a contrast between the evidence linking him to the crime, which it called extensive, and the evidence against the two acquitted defendants, which it found did not reach proof beyond reasonable doubt. The two judgments of the same court now stood side by side: one that held Guede had killed in concorso with others, and one that cleared the only others ever tried.
Guede's lawyers tried to turn that contradiction into a new trial. On August 2, 2016, they filed a petition for revisione, the Italian procedure for reopening a final conviction, at the Court of Appeal in Florence. They argued that his conviction rested on the necessary participation of the two people the Cassazione had since acquitted, and that once those acquittals were final, his own conviction could not stand. They asked the court to acquit him "per non avere commesso il fatto," the same formula that had cleared the others.
The lawyers for the victim's family opposed the petition. They argued that no new evidence had been offered and that the conviction was not incompatible with the acquittals, because what had never been proven was that the murder could not have been committed without those two people.
On January 10, 2017, after deliberating for about an hour with Guede present, the Florence court declared the petition inadmissible. It gave no reasons from the bench. The defense appealed to the Cassazione, and on February 21, 2018, the Fifth Criminal Section of the court rejected that appeal and upheld the ruling. Revision of a final verdict is rare in Italy, and the 2018 decision closed the last ordinary route open to him.
Guede served most of his sentence in a prison in Lazio. His record there became the basis for every later decision about him. The staff and the prison psychologists described his conduct as exemplary, and the courts that later reviewed his case cited the same record.
He studied. Through Roma Tre University he earned a bachelor's degree in Scienze storiche del territorio e della cooperazione internazionale, historical sciences of territory and international cooperation, graduating in 2016 with the highest mark, 110 e lode. By June 2019 he was close to finishing a second degree in the university's history and society program, with a thesis on cinematic narration. He also worked with a volunteer group inside the prison, and later wrote an autobiographical book, Il beneficio del dubbio, The Benefit of the Doubt.
His first steps outside came in 2016. That spring he was granted a furlough of 36 hours for good behavior, and he was allowed an overnight stay at a house run by volunteers who assist prisoners. In the years that followed he received further permessi premio, the reward leaves the Italian system grants for good conduct, and he was authorized to work outside the walls, in the library of a criminology study center that had followed his years in custody.
In September 2019 Guede's lawyers asked the Tribunale di sorveglianza di Roma, the surveillance court that oversees the execution of sentences in the region, to let him serve the rest of his term outside prison, either under the supervision of social services or under house arrest. The court heard the request on September 20 and notified its decision on September 30, 2019. It refused both. It granted semilibertà instead: Guede could leave the prison for some hours each day to work at the criminology study center and had to return in the evening. The court took note of what it called his "percorso didattico e morale," his educational and moral progress.
Little more than a year later the surveillance court accepted the request it had once refused. In early December 2020 it placed Guede in affidamento ai servizi sociali, probation under the supervision of social services, for the remainder of his sentence. He no longer had to return to prison at night. The tribunal described his prison record as "del tutto privo di qualsiasi mancanza sotto ogni profilo," entirely free of any infraction in every respect, and cited his "permanente adesione all'opera di rieducazione," his lasting commitment to rehabilitation. Under the order he worked mornings as a volunteer in a Caritas canteen and afternoons in the library of the criminology study center, which also gave him his living.
Italian prison law grants a prisoner with a good record a reduction of 45 days for every six months served, the liberazione anticipata of article 54 of the penitentiary law. Guede's sentence had been due to end on January 4, 2022. In November 2021 the surveillance magistrate in Viterbo granted him a further reduction under article 54, which moved the end of his term to November 20, 2021. Because that date had already passed, the execution office ordered his release at once. On November 23, 2021, his lawyer announced that Guede had been "scarcerato per fine pena," released at the end of his sentence. He had spent about 14 years in custody and under supervision since his arrest in Germany. He still denied the murder. The release changed little in his days at first: he kept his work in the library of the criminology study center, where he had been employed throughout his time under supervision, and he kept his volunteer shifts as well.
In the years after his release he lived in Italy. In December 2023, after a complaint by a former partner, he was barred from approaching her and placed under electronic monitoring; in February 2024 a court in Rome placed him under twelve months of sorveglianza speciale; in July 2025 he was committed for trial in Viterbo on charges including violenza sessuale and maltrattamenti, which he denies; the trial was continuing in May 2026, and he is presumed innocent of those charges.
Two features of Italian law shaped Guede's sentence from beginning to end. The first was the rito abbreviato. By choosing it in 2008 he was guaranteed that one third would come off whatever sentence the court imposed. That reduction was applied twice in his case: once by the first judge, whose 30 years already reflected it, and again by the appeal court, which set the base term at 24 years and then reduced it by eight. His final term of 16 years compares with the 26 and 25 years imposed in 2009, and later annulled, on the two defendants tried in the ordinary way.
The second was the system that governs a sentence once it is final. In Italy the execution of a prison term is overseen by the surveillance courts: a tribunale di sorveglianza, which decides on measures such as semi-liberty and probation under social services, and the individual surveillance magistrate, who rules on matters such as the article 54 reduction. Guede passed through each stage of that system in order, from reward leaves to semilibertà in 2019, to affidamento ai servizi sociali in 2020, to the early end of his term in 2021. Each decision rested on the court's reading of his conduct in custody, not on any reconsideration of his guilt.
The central unresolved question is the one the courts themselves created. The final judgment against Guede holds that he killed in concorso with others. The final judgment in the other case acquits the only other people ever charged, for not having committed the act. No other person has been charged, and the identity of anyone who may have acted with him is not established. The Florence appeal court and the Cassazione both refused to reopen his conviction on the strength of that contradiction, holding in effect that his guilt did not depend on the guilt of the two acquitted defendants.
Guede's own account has never been accepted by any court. He has said that he was present that evening and that he did not kill the victim, and he has kept to that position since 2007. Every court that ruled on the merits found him guilty, and his conviction is final.
December 26, 1986: Rudy Hermann Guede is born in the Ivory Coast; he later grows up in Perugia.
November 1, 2007: Meredith Kercher dies in Perugia.
November 19, 2007: Police in Perugia release Guede's photographs; he is sought on an international warrant.
November 20, 2007: Guede is arrested in Germany.
Early December 2007: Germany hands Guede over to the Italian authorities.
October 28, 2008: The Perugia judge for the preliminary hearing convicts Guede in a rito abbreviato and sentences him to 30 years; the two others accused are sent to trial.
December 5, 2009: The Corte d'assise in Perugia convicts the two other defendants.
December 22, 2009: The Corte d'assise d'appello di Perugia grants general mitigating circumstances and reduces Guede's sentence to 16 years.
March 22, 2010: The appeal court files its reasons, holding that Guede "concorse pienamente" in the murder.
December 16, 2010: The Corte di Cassazione confirms the 16-year sentence; the conviction becomes final.
October 2011: The Perugia appeal court acquits the two other defendants.
March 27, 2015: The Cassazione annuls the two defendants' later convictions without remand and acquits them "per non aver commesso il fatto."
September 7, 2015: The Cassazione files its written reasons.
2016: Guede earns a bachelor's degree from Roma Tre University and is granted a 36-hour furlough.
August 2, 2016: Guede's lawyers petition the Florence Court of Appeal for revision of the conviction.
January 10, 2017: The Florence court declares the petition inadmissible.
February 21, 2018: The Cassazione's Fifth Criminal Section rejects the appeal against that ruling.
September 30, 2019: The Tribunale di sorveglianza di Roma grants semilibertà.
Early December 2020: Guede is placed in affidamento ai servizi sociali.
November 23, 2021: Guede is released at the end of his sentence after a reduction under article 54.
December 2023 to May 2026: Restraining measures follow a former partner's complaint, and a trial on separate charges opens in Viterbo; he denies the charges and is presumed innocent.