There are too many holes in the Crown’s theory to convict Adèle Sorella for the murder of her two little daughters, Amanda and Sabrina, her lawyers argued Tuesday. The shortcomings of an investigation carried out by police officers who adopted “tunnel vision” are partly responsible for this result, they argued.
The two girls, aged 8 and 9, were found dead on the floor of the playroom of the family home on March 31, 2009 — more than 14 years ago.
Adèle Sorella, now 57, is undergoing her third trial for murder. The first two resulted in guilty verdicts, but on two occasions the Court of Appeal ordered a new trial.
Unlike the first two, this one takes place without a jury, before a single judge, Myriam Lachance of the Superior Court, at the Laval courthouse.
It therefore took place differently, and in a rather unusual way: instead of bringing witnesses to the stand, the judge listened in the court room to the recordings of the testimonies given in the second criminal trial.
But like the two previous times, Me Pierre Poupart was busy in pleading destroying the Crown’s evidence, which intends to demonstrate that the girls were killed in a scenario of “extended suicide”, that is to say that Adèle Sorella wanted to kill herself. life without leaving her little girls behind. The Crown prosecutor, Me Marie-Claude Bourassa maintains that the accused had the exclusive opportunity to kill the two children that morning.
One of the unique elements of this case is that the medical examiner could not determine the medical cause of the death of the girls, who had no drugs or medication in their system and whose bodies bore no marks. A “blank autopsy”, she will say, before proceeding, as the profession dictates, by elimination to arrive at a conclusion of death by asphyxiation. She pointed to the hyperbaric chamber – an enclosed place – present in the family home to treat the medical condition of one of the two girls as the source of this death by suffocation.
“Deficiencies” in the investigation?
Me Poupart raised in his pleading what he considers to be flaws in this theory.
His client, who had physical limitations, could never have forcibly kept the two girls in the hyperbaric chamber, a type of cylinder measuring eight feet by three feet that uses oxygen at a pressure higher than atmospheric pressure. They would have struggled, he argued, which would have left marks. And then, how could their mother, who struggled to lift objects, have carried them one floor lower to lie them down in the playroom?
“There is one who is heavier than her,” he said. Without forgetting that there would likely have been a transfer of clothing fibers, added the lawyer.
Furthermore, continued Me Poupart, there was no trace of the children’s DNA in the hyperbaric chamber, nor fibers that could have come from their clothing. Nor were there traces of Adèle Sorella’s DNA on the girls, he added. Stains on the pillow were not analyzed, he said, sharply: “The shortcomings of the investigation had serious consequences for Mr.me Sorella. »
Because everyone worked with “tunnel vision” to link the hyperbaric chamber to the death of the children at all costs, he argues. The investigators thus put aside valuable clues which could have implied a gesture of revenge by organized crime against the family, since M’s husbandme Sorella was Giuseppe De Vito, a lieutenant in the Italian mafia. He was on the run at the time of the children’s deaths, hiding since the mass arrests of Operation Colisée.
Supporting the defense theory is the presence of a suspicious boot print in the basement, the disappearance — shortly before — of the image recording module of a sophisticated surveillance camera system, and the fact that Giuseppe De Vito later died of cyanide poisoning in his prison cell.
Me Poupart also argued another aspect of his theory: Adèle Sorella was a sick, suffering person, in a depressed state for years and obsessed with suicidal ideas.
On the day of his daughters’ death, “there was a dissociative episode”, he pleaded, recalling this conclusion of expert psychiatrist Gilles Chamberland. The woman was found the day Amanda and Sabrina died at the wheel of her car, which had hit a pole and sank into a ditch.
A doctor submitted to the court that Mme Sorella was unable to say whether his actions were right or wrong, the standard for not being criminally responsible on the grounds of mental disorder.
To this day, the lawyer told Judge Lachance, she is still in the dark about whether she had a role to play in the deaths of her children.
The Crown’s closing argument will be delivered on Wednesday.