From the
English summary of Raffaele Sollecito's appeal document: "An item of food found in the 3rd distal esophagus was kept in a container but never tested to determine what is was, which likely was an apple from the apple pie desert she ate after dinner and not a mushroom from her home. The defense requests that this sample be tested to confirm what it is. If the sample is apple as the defense believes, the time of death would be closer to the range that the defense suggests, 9:30pm to 10:00pm." Whether it was a mushroom or apple is interesting but not an absolutely vital issue to either the prosecution's case or to the defense's arguments in my judgment. Even if Meredith had eaten a mushroom, it would not change the issues surrounding the lack of material in her duodenum.
IMO the emptiness of the duodenum makes the Mignini/Massei timelines unlikely, just as Meredith's phone records between about 9:58 to 10:15 PM independently do the same thing. The same is true of the lack of a second call to her mother, the lack of texting, the failure to remove the laundry. Moreover, these improbabilities are multiplicative. One more thing: Meredith's apparent t(lag) for this meal was longer than average or median values, so much so that even if one moves the time of her last meal much later, to 7:45 for example, it does not make Massei's TOD more likely than one closer to 9 PM.
If someone believes that Amanda went to her apartment around 9 PM without Raffaele and that there was a confrontation shortly thereafter, then lack-of-duodenum arguments are unlikely to persuade him or her otherwise. However, such a scenario raises other questions: How did Amanda alone communicate with Rudi? How did she communicate with Raffaele if not by cell phone (there being no record of communication between Amanda and Raffaele)? How quickly could Amanda go from acting normally (Popovic) to being so messed up on drugs that she would participate in murder? Why didn't Curatolo see Rudi? I don't mean this as an exhaustive list.
