Ilaria Sula murder, Samson's mother confesses: 'I helped him clean up'

"I helped him clean the house, to wipe away the traces of all that blood". The mother of Mark Antony Samson, the 23-year-old who stabbed Ilaria Sula to death, confessed in an interrogation lasting more than three hours at the police headquarters that she had played an 'active' role in the aftermath of the crime.

For her, Nors Man Lapaz, the thoughtful charge of conspiracy in the concealment of the corpse was thus formalised. In the order, the gip states that Samson 'acted coldly and callously': the young woman was attacked 'brutally' by a person 'whom she trusted'. As admitted by the 23-year-old himself, in the hours following the arrest, his mother was at home at the time of the attack, when the boy killed with at least three stabs the student with whom he had had a brief love affair.

It was the woman herself who asked to be questioned, according to reports, and she walked through the entrance of the police headquarters at around 2 p.m. on Monday, together with her lawyer. She arrived before the investigators as a person with information on the facts, but her position immediately changed in the light of her statements. A real confession about what was done in the flat on via Homs, in the African quarter of the capital. On her role from the very start of the investigation, the investigators harboured heavy suspicions.

In addition to the factual data, the cells of the woman's phone placed her in the area of the house, logic also led the investigators to believe that Samson had not done everything on his own as the boy claimed during his interrogation to validate his arrest during almost five hours in Regina Coeli prison where he is still detained. The boy explained that he had basically done everything in little more than three hours: he attacked Ilaria around 11 am after reading a message on her mobile phone from another boy. He hit her in the neck with a kitchen knife, causing a violent haemorrhagic shock.

At that point, the plan to make the traces disappear was triggered and the student's mother intervened. It is not clear whether the woman also helped her son to stuff Ilaria's body into the suitcase, after wrapping it in a bag and placing it in a trolley. Mark allegedly dragged the luggage with the 22-year-old's body into the car at around 2 p.m. and then drove to the Poli area where he threw the trolley. At the moment, the version of both the boy and his mother are under scrutiny by the prosecutors, who accuse Samson of aggravated intentional homicide. The father's position, which appears more nuanced as he would not have been at home at the indicated time of the murder, remains under the investigators' lens. "The boy's parents are wracked with grief, incredulous, still in shock, frightened and are asking for sincere forgiveness for everything that happened," lawyer Paolo Foti, defending the murderer's mother, said as he left the Questura.