Adele Sorella’s lawyer began his closing arguments in her murder trial by criticizing the work that crime scene investigators did in the hours after her two daughters were found dead inside the family’s home in Laval.
Pierre Poupart asked the jury to consider two things as he spoke Monday at the Laval courthouse. One is that the Laval police were so “obsessed” with the theory that Sorella had poisoned her two daughters — Amanda, 9, and Sabrina, 8 — at the end of March 2009, that they failed to rule out the possibility that another person killed them. The other, Poupart said, is that their focus on the possibility the girls were poisoned caused them to mishandle a hyperbaric chamber, which eventually became the focus of the investigation, as a piece of evidence.
To support his argument, Poupart targeted an elaborate system of surveillance cameras Sorella said her now-deceased husband, Giuseppe De Vito, had installed in their home long before he was apparently tipped off, in November 2006, that the RCMP was about to arrest him in a large-scale drug trafficking investigation. De Vito managed to avoid arrest until 2010.
When she testified, Sorella said she was not aware that her husband was involved in drug trafficking and did not see the point of the security cameras, especially one that De Vito had installed on a utility pole across from their home. An experienced real estate agent, Sorella said she knew that camera violated municipal laws. On Monday, Poupart noted that a crime scene investigator acknowledged that it was the first time he had ever seen someone install a camera in such a place and was surprised to see it there.
All of the cameras De Vito had installed were connected to a small room in the basement of Sorella’s home where images were broadcast on a series of screens. The same crime scene investigator testified that the video display room was important to the investigation.
However, Poupart noted, the same person failed to have a photograph taken of the print of a boot found on the floor to record it as evidence. The crime scene technician testified the print could have come off a boot from the first police officers to enter the home.
“But (the boot) isn’t sold exclusively to police officers,” Poupart said. “Incredibly enough, he doesn’t take the faintest photo of this print.”
Poupart also criticized the way the Laval police handled the hyperbaric chamber found inside the home. The Crown’s theory is that Sorella used the chamber, purchased to treat Sabrina’s arthritis, to gradually kill her daughters by suffocation.
Poupart noted that the Laval police only considered the chamber as a potential murder weapon a few days after the girls were killed.
The attorney reminded the jury that no one checked the chamber for fingerprints before it was removed from the home, on April 3, 2009, and taken to Laval police station where it was finally examined more than two weeks later.
Poupart also argued that crime scene investigators did little to check for fingerprints to rule out the possibility that someone snuck into the home and killed the girls. Crime scene investigators who testified attributed this to how there were no signs to suggest someone had broken into Sorella’s home.
“Everyone on the scene thought it was a poisoning,” Poupart said. “From the start there was an obsession, a certainty, that it had to be (Sorella) and no one else.”
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Adele Sorella walks to court in her trial in the deaths of her two daughters with lawyer Guy Poupart at the Palais de Justice de Laval in Laval on May 29, 2013.