Mother of Laval woman suspected of killing her two children takes the stand

MONTREAL — A key witness for the prosecution in the trial of Adele Sorella found herself answering questions about a glaring contradiction in her testimony at the Laval courthouse Monday morning.

Theresa Di Cesare is Sorella’s mother and was the last person to see her and Sorella’s two daughters before the girls were killed on March 31, 2009. Sorella is charged with first-degree murder in both deaths. By March 2009, Di Cesare had been living in Laval with her daughter and granddaughters – Amanda, 9, and Sabrina, 8 – for two years because the girls’ father, Giuseppe De Vito, disappeared while wanted as a suspect in a drug-trafficking investigation.

During her testimony on Monday, Di Cesare said Sorella made three suicide attempts after De Vito disappeared in November 2006. She said that following the first attempt, she decided to move in with her daughter in January 2007, because she was concerned about her living alone with the two girls. Following the third attempted suicide, Di Cesare said, life at Sorella’s home had returned somewhat normal.

On March 31, 2009, Di Cesare woke up, prepared breakfast for her granddaughters, including warmed-up milk with a touch of coffee and sugar, and headed out for an appointment with a doctor that Sorella had arranged for her.

She testified that as she headed out the door, she passed Sorella and her granddaughters and that both were dressed in their school uniforms. Di Cesare testified that nothing out of the ordinary was said that morning. When pressed, by prosecutor Maria Albanese, Di Cesare insisted that nothing unusual was said.

At that point, Albanese asked Superior Court Justice Carol Cohen if she could “refresh the witness’s memory.” The jury was briefly excused while Albanese and Poupart discussed how to proceed and Cohen ultimately decided the jury could be shown a video recording of a statement Di Cesare gave to a Laval police investigator just five hours after Amanda and Sabrina’s bodies were discovered in Sorella’s home by her two brothers. Sorella had disappeared at that point.

In the video, Di Cesare is seen giving the police a completely different version of what was said as she headed out the door to look in on her sister’s house in Montreal, an errand that was to be followed by the appointment Sorella had arranged for her.

“(Sorella) said she was going to take them to a doctor,” Di Cesare told the investigator back in 2009. She said one (girl) had a problem with her teeth and the other a problem with her ear.”

But Di Cesare recalled none of this when she testified Monday morning. When asked, by Albanese, to explain the glaring contradictions, Di Cesare said she has trouble recalling events after having learned her granddaughters had died.

“If you want to talk about that night (the interview with the investigator) or in the months that followed, my head wasn’t working,” Di Cesare said. “There were times I couldn’t remember my name.”

The trial resumes Monday afternoon.