The Vatican announced on Monday (9) the reopening of an investigation into the disappearance of a young woman in 1983, a case that has never been clarified and the target of conspiracy theories around the Holy See.
Emanuela Orlandi, whose family lived in Vatican City — her father was a papal official — was 15 and returning from a music lesson in Rome when she disappeared. The Vatican prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi, reopened the investigation after requests from the family of the missing person.
According to the British newspaper The Guardian, the focus of the investigation, however, will be the case of Mirella Gregori, who disappeared in Rome weeks before Orlandi. The two episodes are believed to be linked.
In October last year, the Netflix streaming service launched “The Missing Vatican Girl”, a series that tells the story of Orlandi and explains the theories that emerged about the case, which were never proven.
A former companion of the criminal Enrico de Pedis, for example, suspected of belonging to the mafia and Vatican finance sectors, accused him of having kidnapped the young woman and buried her body.
The teenager was allegedly kidnapped by the Banda della Magliana, a criminal group led by Pedis, to recover a loan from a former president of the Vatican Bank, Paul Marcinkus. Thus, the disappearance would have been a mafia retaliation.
In 2005, an anonymous viewer called an Italian television program and said that the solution to the case lay in Pedis’ tomb. The Italian justice even opened the tomb of the criminal, murdered in 1990 in a reckoning, but found no connection with the disappearance of the young woman.
There is also a theory that argues that there was a kidnapping of the teenager to obtain the release of Mehmet Ali Agça, a Turk who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981.
In an open letter from 2019, Agça assured that Orlandi was alive. It would be necessary, according to him, to look for clues in files of the CIA, the intelligence agency of the United States.
In the series, Orlandi’s brother claims that Pope Francis would have said that she “is in heaven” – indicating, according to the family, that the Vatican knows what happened to the young woman. The Netflix production raises other hypotheses: that the teenager was taken to London, where she stayed in a Catholic hostel until 1997, and that she was abused by a member of the Vatican days before her disappearance.
“In the next few hours I will ask for a meeting with the prosecutor. So far, the Vatican has done nothing,” the family’s lawyer, Laura Sgro, told the AFP news agency. “What documents do you want to review? Those from the Rome prosecutor’s office investigation or is there a file you want to share? For years I’ve been asking them to question people at the top of the Vatican. Sadly, some have already died.”
To the Guardian Sgro said that he heard about the reopening of the investigation through the press. “We wrote to the pope a year ago to speak with the prosecutor. We are of course happy that an investigation is being carried out, but we really hope that this will provide concrete answers,” he said.
After the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, his personal secretary, Georg Gaenswein, said he will write a memoir entitled “Nothing But the Truth: My Life with Pope Benedict XVI”. According to news published at the beginning of the year, the publication’s editor said that Orlandi’s case would be addressed.
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