Bologna, 4 June 2024 – It’s up to them two sons of Giampaolo Amato and Isabella Lsala testify today before the Assize Court that is trying the father, 64-year-old doctor accused of murder of the mother, also a 62-year-old doctor, and the grandmother (mother of the mother) Giulia Tateo, found lifeless in bed 22 days apart in October 2021. For the prosecution, the man told her killed with a lethal cocktail of drugs, which is a benzodiazepine and an anesthetic. The children did not take civil action, unlike their aunt Annamaria (lawyer Maurizio Merlini) and great-uncle Nicola Tateo (lawyer Francesca Stortoni).
“But mum was in a lot of pain at that timefor the extramarital relationship of dad. And already in February 2019, writing to friends, I spoke of the suspicion that he was taking drugs to calm himself down.” The defense assist from the eldest daughter, Anna Chiara, arrived immediately; the theory of the defendant’s defenders (lawyers Gianluigi Lebro and Cesarina Mitaritonna) is in fact that the woman had independently taken the drugs which would then have been lethal. Very concentrated and composed, Anna Chiara never wavers during the interrogation by prosecutor Morena Plazzi, nor does he ever look his father in the eye. “The discovery that our father was having an affair was a bolt from the blue for us children, who had always grown up in the Mulino Bianco family. It was a huge upheaval.”
Of the analyzes that were discovered in May 2019 a high presence of benzodiazepines in Lsala’s urine and the woman’s suspicions that her husband secretly administered them to her, Anna Chiara says: “I knew nothing about the tests. I myself had witnessed episodes of sudden drowsiness from my mother: I wasn’t worried, it had happened several times in the past, she had a tendency towards narcolepsy. But she never told me she had any suspicions about my father and I’m sure she would have told me if she had. I was her confidant in that period and she also told me things that, as a daughter, I would never have wanted to hear.”
In the courtroom, Anna Chiara reads the message to her friend, dated 26 February 2019: “Mom freaks out and says nonsense, maybe there
they hospitalize. I’m convinced he takes something to feel better, even if he doesn’t tell us. I think she takes too much, last night she fell asleep with her face on her plate, at dinner with me and Nic (her brother, ed)”.
The thirty-one year old also denied her father’s financial problems, although she said she was “very sensitive” to the topic, fearing that her lover was with him to get money. And she also partly reviews the dynamics of the request for cremation that the man would have made immediately after the death of his wife: “Dad said there was the option of placing her in the family tomb, but my brother said no and ended there. Afterwards, I was the one who said that one day, when my father also died, we could cremate them so that they could rest together.”
