Amanda Knox is reportedly engaged to a childhood friend

Caitlin Dickson
·Editor
Amanda Knox seen out in New York with new boyfriend Colin Sutherland, Sept. 29, 2014. The couple were seen walking hand in hand together and passionately kissing while on a day trip to Coney Island, N.Y. (Splash News)

For Amanda Knox, white may be the new orange. The 27-year-old — who was convicted, then acquitted, then reconvicted in the 2007 murder of her study-abroad roommate — is engaged to a childhood friend.

Knox met fiancé Colin Sutherland in middle school, but the two didn’t start dating until last year. She confirmed reports of their engagement in an email to Seattle Times columnist Jonathan Martin, with whom she shared an off-the-record coffee last year.

The couple’s prenuptial excitement is likely marred by anxiety about Knox’s latest pending appeal.

The Seattle native and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted in 2009 of the gruesome murder of British college student Meredith Kercher, who was found dead in the Perugia, Italy, apartment she and Knox were sharing in 2007.

They both successfully appealed their convictions in 2011, and after four years in an Italian prison, Knox was able to resume life as a creative-writing student at the University of Washington.

But just as things were beginning to get somewhat back to normal — Martin writes that after graduating, Knox started working at a Seattle bookstore and got a freelance-writing gig with the West Seattle Herald — Italy’s supreme court overturned her acquittal, as well as Sollecito’s.

It was then that her ex-boyfriend debuted his new defense strategy, attempting to distance himself from Knox and her admission that she was, contrary to original claims, in the house with Kercher when the murder took place.

Knox reportedly received letters from her now-fiancé while in prison, suggesting that Sutherland — a recently transplanted New York musician — is prepared to be patient about wedding planning. Italy’s highest court is slated to hear the latest appeal in the Kercher case on March 25. That hearing could determine if Italy will attempt to extradite Knox for yet another trial or acquit her once and for all. In the meantime, Martin writes, Sutherland "has signed up to be stalked by paparazzi, British tabloids and Internet trolls. It must be love."