There is a woman in Greece – named Roula Pispirigou – who is considered the reincarnation of the devil. Aged 34, she is accused of having killed her three daughters (aged nine, four years and six months). Incarcerated in a maximum security prison since March 2022, she has always defended her innocence. And there are scientists who believe it. Independent experts argue that the three girls, and possibly Roula, shared a pathology with a similar basis that affects the heart and liver. Among these experts is the Spanish immunogeneticist Carola García de Vinuesa, who traveled to Athens in November to testify about the case at the courthouse.
Everything was triggered by the death of the eldest daughter, nine-year-old Georgina, in January 2022. The girl, who suffered a cardiorespiratory arrest while in hospital, had a string of pathologies: she had suffered a previous stop – which left her a quadriplegic and required the implantation of a pacemaker–, she suffered from epilepsy, was fed through a gastrostomy tube and had lost a quarter of her weight... She ended up dying in hospital and, at first (and pending the results of the autopsy), they ruled the cause of death undetermined. Post-mortem forensic analysis revealed pathology in the liver and heart, although it also detected ketamine in the body. The toxicologist at the Greek children's hospital who treated her stated that she had not been supplied with this substance, and this is where the accusation against Pispirigou began to be forged. Indeed, the medical record does not show the use of ketamine (which is an anaesthetic), although neither does rocuronium, which is the substance that the medical staff claimed was given to Georgina shortly before she died , during endotracheal intubation.
Following Georgina's case, the police went back in time to reassess the cause of death of her two sisters (Malena and Irida), who had died earlier. The first, four years old, died in 2019, nine days after starting chemotherapy to treat leukemia; the second (six months old) died in 2021 with severe congenital heart disease. The new hypothesis? The two daughters were suffocated, so Roula was charged with triple murder.
Last month, Vinuesa presented to the judicial headquarters part of the conclusions of the report that he prepared with his colleague Todor Arsov. In the aforementioned document - read in front of the judge - they state that there are "reasonable medical explanations" that point to the natural death of the girls and that "suggest a hereditary congenital liver and heart disease". They claim that "there is no scientific evidence" that points to Roula's responsibility. The reflections of Professor Robert Flanagan, a prestigious toxicologist with expertise in forensic toxicology, and Peter Fleming, a pediatric intensivist and expert in sudden infant death syndrome, also appear in the report. The first emphasizes that "ketamine is a drug widely used in surgical procedures" and that "it is most likely" that it was the health workers of the same hospital who administered it to the girl. And the second asserts that “the abnormalities found at autopsy in both the heart and liver bear some similarities to those found at autopsy in the two sisters, raising the possibility of an underlying inherited metabolic cause or contributing factor ". Now it will be the justice who determines the innocence of Roula or not.
