Focusing on the murder of the British exchange student Meredith Kercher in the Italian university
town of Perugia, this paper studies the way in which social media have created a forum for
‘wikiforensics’ through which detractors and supporters, with the help of (self-declared) experts,
speculate extensively about the guilt and innocence of the accused.
Employing a theoretical framework that includes critical discourse analysis and metaphor
studies, we look at how social networks seek to connect with forensic-legal evidence through
lexical fields which denote dirt and pollution but which also act as a powerful proxy for the moral
character of the suspects and the probity of forensic and legal procedure. Our preliminary findings
raise questions about the significance of race and gender in online character constructions.
