A water bottle found on the floor, between the bedside table and Sara's bed, exhibit no. 100. And then a yellowish bottle with liquid and sediment at the bottom, a garbage bin, a pink bag with Kefir on the stairs and a package with work gloves. These are the five of the 131 finds taken away from the Di Vita house in Pietracatella on which the experts from the Robert Koch institute were unable to carry out laboratory analyzes in search of ricin because they feared "damaging or eliminating any traces relevant from the point of view of forensic science". So they wrote in the note sent to the prosecutor of Larino Elvira Antonelli asking for an extension for the conclusion of their investigations in search of traces of the poison that killed Antonella Di Ielsi and Sara Di Vita between 27 and 28 December last year.
And this is why, before proceeding with the analyzes that could be decisive, the technicians of the Robert Koch Institute requested the presence of the Italian police but also of the representatives of the parties, from the doctors of the Campobasso hospital still under investigation for manslaughter, to the consultants of the Di Vita and Di Ielsi families.
The ones that will be carried out on Thursday next week in Berlin will still be unrepeatable technical checks. To protect the finds seized from the Di Vita home from any environmental pollution that could then make them unusable, the Larino Prosecutor's Office has therefore asked the scientific police who will travel to Berlin on Thursday together with the investigators of the Campobasso flying squad directed by Marco Graziano to "acquire the latent fingerprints and biological traces". The operations that will be carried out with the most advanced technical-scientific procedures will all be video-recorded and the related reports will be filed within five days.
A decidedly relevant step in an extremely complex investigation which, almost eleven months after the death of the two women, awaits the comfort of scientific data to take the definitive path perhaps with the registration of some names in the register of suspects.
The investigators' suspicions immediately focused on the water bottle found next to Sara's bed, right from the first inspection of the Di Vita house when no one still had any idea that mother and daughter had been poisoned and it was thought they had fallen victim to a fulminant intestinal infection. And one of the inconsistencies of this mystery revolves around the water bottle.
When Gianni Di Vita was interviewed for the first time, in January, the investigators asked him if his wife or daughter were using a water bottle and he replied. “No, neither Antonella nor Sara drank the mineral water that I brought home”. Why does Gianni Di Vita respond like this given that a water bottle was found next to his daughter's bed and the girl, who was constantly vomiting, probably continued to drink from there in the hours following her first discharge from hospital when the doctors had recommended her to hydrate?
It is possible that the odorless and tasteless ricin could have been placed right inside the water bottle and Sara therefore continued to drink and poison herself even after her first discharge from the emergency room. «A hypothesis that would also be compatible with what my client, Dr. Vuotto, has always said – observes the lawyer Pietro Terminiello – that the conditions in which the two patients returned to hospital were so different from the first hospitalization as to suggest a further subsequent intake of ricin».
It will therefore be fundamental to ascertain whether there are still traces of ricin in that water bottle and possibly who the fingerprints of those who touched it belong to.
Yesterday, the investigators once again called Michele, the laboratory technician of the Riccia Agricultural Institute, one of the institutes where investigations were carried out on the PCs in search of possible access to the Reddit platform on which a self-styled writer had asked for information on how to use ricin.
