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Relatives of slain student say they won't read accused killer's memoir

Amanda Knox during a news conference held at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport near Seattle, Washington on October 4, 2011. UPI Photo/Jim Bryant
Amanda Knox during a news conference held at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport near Seattle, Washington on October 4, 2011. UPI Photo/Jim Bryant | License Photo

PERUGIA, Italy, May 1 (UPI) -- Relatives of a British coed slain in Italy in 2007 said they won't read the memoir U.S. student Amanda Knox wrote about being tried for her roommate's death.

In "Waiting to be Heard," released Tuesday, Knox wrote about her experience in the Italian justice system. The Seattle-area woman and Raffaele Sollecito, her boyfriend at the time, were tried for murder in Perugia for the slaying of Meredith Kercher. A third defendant, Ivory Coast native Rudy Guede, was convicted in 2008 and is serving a 16-year prison sentence.

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"We're not interested in this book, just like we weren't interested in the others about the case, and we won't read it," Kercher's sister Stephanie Kercher told the Italian news agency ANSA.

Knox was convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison for Meredith Kercher's murder but an appeals court overturned a lower court's ruling last year, setting her free to return to the United States. Sollecito, who was sentenced to 25 years in jail, was also acquitted in 2011.

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On March 25, Italy's Court of Cassation overturned the acquittal.

In an interview with ABC News, Knox said she reacted to the news of her roommate's death in "a number of ways." Italian prosecutors said Knox was acting strangely at the Perugia police station after her roommate was found dead.

"I was angry, was pacing, thinking about what Meredith was -- must have been through," she said. "I had already been through hours of questioning, and her friends came much later. And they were much more vulnerable, and in that moment I wasn't sensitive enough to their feelings. But what I was hearing was that somebody did something horrible to my friend, and I could not conceive how it could be anything but how horrible it was."

Knox said she experienced shock, disbelief, sadness, anger and "this stubborn drive to do what I thought an adult would do, which was help."

She also said Italian prosecutors were incorrect in trying to paint her relationship with Kercher as strained.

"We didn't have an estrangement and we didn't argue about anything," Knox told ABC News.

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