found a molecule that could clarify what happened

Mesalazine. A word of 5 syllables, very strange and unusual, can help us explain an equally strange and unusual case such as the disappearance and death, in the city of Trieste, of Liliana Resinovich.

This molecule is used in pharmacies and, according to the autopsy, was found in Liliana’s body. He is unable to kill. However, it could be an indicator to understand what happened when Liliana disappeared from her house. Let’s see how and why.

It is mid-December 2021, exactly the 14th, when Lilly, as everyone calls her, leaves her house in the morning. She will not return. Her body, wrapped in plastic bags, will be found at the beginning of January, in a wood not far from a place, dear to Lilly, called The strawberry place.

The police and the medical examiner arrive. The missing lady was therefore found “in a narrow passage area with a pedestrian but impervious and treacherous surface”, between a fence and a cliff. Enveloping the “head and upper regions of the chest” is a black bag. And “a similar bag, also clean and intact on the outside” contains “a good part of the abdomen and the lower limbs. There was no external presence of bindings, for example with ropes or adhesive tape.”

They are all careful, we read in the official documents, not to “manipulate the corpse excessively so as not to disperse any traces”. Under the black bag, “two thin and intact plastic bags, slightly opaque and with green writing, as if on vegetables, emerge. These bags were closed, at neck level, with a string tied, but not very tight and with a knot not present in the left lateral cervical area”.

A CT scan is performed first. Then the autopsy. And for science there are no mysteries: “There are no signs that could be attributable to violence at the hands of others or in any case clearly attributable to a crime.” Furthermore, “death occurred no later than 48 hours after the discovery of the body”.

The garbage bags – let’s remember once again – are intact and traces of the last breakfast can be found in Lilly’s stomach. The Public Prosecutor’s Office of Trieste, trusting the science, therefore decides to request the dismissal. For investigators the diagnosis of this case is very simple. Liliana decided to give herself “an asphyxiated death like a confined space (‘plastic bag suffocation’) without major ligatures or hemorrhages on the neck”. End of the case.

Already. But who says it’s the end? The power of attorney? Of course, however, the (temporary) closure of the suicide file does not automatically close the mystery. On the contrary, this is where the questions begin (and the need for truth) of the Lilianas’ relatives, of ordinary people, of journalists.

One question – useless for the investigators – stands out above all the others: but if our Lilly has been dead for two or three days, in all the others from December to the day before yesterday, where has she been? Tell us. Did you take refuge in the house of a friend or a friend? Have you stayed in a hotel without registering? Were you accepted into a convent under a false name? Or was she a prisoner? Was she manipulated?

Faced with these questions, perhaps irrelevant, certainly legitimate, the prosecutor’s office decides not to answer: the case must be closed as a suicide, there is no outside hand and therefore it doesn’t matter to the detectives where Lilly has been.

In short, science has spoken clearly, from his point of view. The judiciary has drawn its conclusions, from the point of view of the procedural code. Everything is clear, right?

No, and in fact against this granitic clarity, month after month, questions, allusions, suggestions are hurled, which turn into a waterfall, a river in flood, a storm which between social media and TV makes Lilly’s case known to million of people.

And even the judiciary itself, through the judge for preliminary investigations, changes perspective. He no longer accepts the dismissal proposal for suicide “full stop”. He asks for further investigations. He asks – attention – science to pronounce itself once again: a new autopsy is needed. More in-depth than the first. And the new forensic doctors will also have to establish something that (to us) seems halfway between the surreal and the science fiction: that is, to exclude that Lilly’s body, which disappeared in December, was frozen until January to reappear, suddenly, on the hill overlooking Trieste. That is, we hear it repeated on social media, “Lilly died immediately”, in December.

However, scientific thinking, regardless of any autopsy, should continue to guide us. Therefore, so far in the world there is no freezing method that does not leave traces on the body. When a body dies it begins immediately its decomposition. This concept has been known by scientists, and not only, for several hundred years.

Science has made great strides in recent times. If Lilly’s body had been frozen, why are there no traces of this frost that enveloped her body? How come Lilly’s eyeball was still okay and hadn’t completely frozen over? And without going into too many details, how was a frozen body brought to a forest overlooking a city? And how did it thaw? And why are there no traces (puddles?) left of this absurd thawing?

Scientific thinking would suggest also other inconsistencies to those who claim that the body was taken into the woods by someone and that Lilly did not get there on her own two feet: first of all, hypostatic spots exist. When a human being dies, his heart stops beating, so the blood stops pulsating. Handling a body in these conditions implies leaving marks.

You don’t transport a body with the power of thought, but with your hands, with a rope, with a pulley, with a wheelbarrow. With anything that, in contact with the body, leaves a mark. All these signs on Lilli’s body, according to the first autopsy, they are not here.

The autopsy tells – despite those who hypothesize freezers and freezers – the story of a human body that stopped living recently. And there can be no serious doubts about this very important detail: at least one doesn’t believe that the film “2001 A Space Odyssey” has a less imaginative branch in Trieste. Or, vice versa, we must take into consideration the hypothesis – in our opinion impossible – that the autopsy was completely wrong and the doctors did not see the frostbite.

Now mistrust in doctors can spread, but only up to a certain point. That is, it is better to believe the facts and not what Leonardo Sciascia called “the ghosts of the facts”. The autopsy, which takes place in the presence of various people and which produces various reports, did not lie.

But we realized – here we go back to mesalazine – of a careless error. That is, in the toxicology tests on Lilly they talk about “aspirin”, but it is not. According to what the doctors write, traces of 5-amino-salicylic acid and 8-hydroxyquinoline were in fact detected. The first compound in the urine, the second compound in the blood.

According to the autopsy, the first compound indicates – this is the error – the previous intake of an aspirin or a common tachypirin. That is, an amino group was exchanged with an acetyl group. In fact, 5-amino-salicylic acid is not found in aspirin, but in mesalazine, that is, in a drug that is sold only with a medical prescription and is most frequently used to treat Crohn’s disease or intestinal inflammation.

Therefore, if Lilli died in January, and did not suffer from Crohn’s disease, she must have come into contact with mesalazine (which is eliminated in about 36 hours) exactly where she lived: perhaps in the house of a person who suffers from pathologies intestinal? And perhaps 8-hydroxy quinoline-based pesticides are used in this person’s house?

Investigators considered knowing where Lilly had been irrelevant to closing the case and, as we saw more than two years later, the decision became the most classic of boomerangs. But perhaps today there is – thanks to mesalazine, mistaken for aspirin – the possibility of understanding where Lilly, who committed suicide according to the investigators, was hospitalized for a long period: which we imagine of reflection and pain, of reasoning about the future and the past.

We would not have come this far if in an era like ours scientific thought were not continually disturbed by non-thought, by romantic thought, by hypotheses that have no basis in reality.

More than a mystery, that of poor Liliana Resinovich is in fact a mystery: an apparently calm woman, like so many of us, who on a morning like any other, always the same, repetitive, monotonous, leaves the house: and then, without leaving practically a trace, disappears for many days in a city where there is no shortage of cameras .

Last clarification: there are those who believe that she was held prisoner for a long time and then one day killed. It seems strange that there are no traces of reaction or defense on her body that any human being would have had if she had been held prisoner. There are then those who suggest that she was drugged. But then there should be traces of the narcotic in the body: there aren’t.

There are those who say that she had an illness while she was with someone and that someone put her in bags and took her up the hill. Very disturbing hypothesis, but this too clashes with reality: how do we transport a dead body, in which the blood flow has stopped, without leaving traces? And how can we transport it without breaking the fragile plastic that contained it? We simply don’t – we repeat we don’t – can.

But since Investigators have not ascertained where Lilly has beenso the story of this 63-year-old woman has become populated by thousands of strangers who, without knowing her in the slightest, have convinced themselves they can get inside her head.

That is, they think they understand what the state of her relationships with her husband, or with her friends, or with a “special friend” was. They think of excluding, based on Lilly’s sporting life, the darkness that sometimes envelops people who seem, superficially, more serene. They think that a woman, just because she has a husband more or less by her side, cannot have a complicated, inexpressible, unattainable inner life.

We hear it repeated that Lilly wouldn’t have done this or wouldn’t have done that: but who today can really seriously put themselves in Lilli’s place? Who can really say they knew her thoroughly? Since December 2021, when she disappeared from home, we have heard many, too many: and this river has never made a dent in the substance of Lilly, a reserved woman, who did not really want to be known by others while alive and of whom it was made a mess of words in death.

If the testimonies collected so far have produced little, who knows what new ones may emerge. For this reason, the 5-amino-salicylic acid molecule in the urine could be a sort of flag: can tell us that “Lilly has been here”, in the home of a person suffering from Crohn’s disease, who has many plants, perhaps quite a few bonsai.

We can’t know today whether and how the investigations will continue (or not continue). Nor when will we have the results of the new research on Lilly’s exhumed body. But now, rather than listening to the broken record of the testimonies of relatives and friends who hate each other, perhaps it is time to try listening to someone who up until now, who knows for what reasons, has never spoken.

Someone who may have lent his house to Lilly. Or someone whose house Lilly entered without her knowledge. After so many words, at least one “fact” would be needed.