The disappearance of the then 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi is one of the most mysterious criminal cases in Italian history. A Netflix series has brought new attention to the case, and now the Vatican wants to resume the investigation.
Emanuela Orlandi, then 15, disappeared almost 40 years ago. All investigations came to nothing.
«Emanuela was no ordinary child. She was a Vatican girl.” With these words, the four-part true crime series “Vatican Girl” begins, which was broadcast on Netflix in October 2022. It is about Emanuela Orlandi, the then 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee, who disappeared in 1983.
Her disappearance is one of the greatest mysteries in Italian criminal history, and to this day there is no trace of Emanuela Orlandi. Numerous theories have been put forward about the case over the past few decades, ranging from a Turkish terrorist organization to organized crime in Italy to a sex crime by the Vatican police.
The Vatican is launching a new investigation
The latter has now, almost 40 years after Orlandi’s disappearance, announced that it will reopen the case. The Netflix series may have played its part, even if the authorities do not say so. The Vatican prosecutor Alessandro Diddi only announced on Monday that the investigations had been resumed in part “due to inquiries from the family in several places”. A few weeks earlier, the Orlandi family had asked the Italian parliament to take up the matter.
The search for the girl has repeatedly aroused the excitement of the Italian population over the past few decades – above all because new leads kept appearing that sounded promising, but then turned out to be wrong or useless. This is what is known about the case to this day:
A first lead led to Turkish terrorists
On June 22, 1983, Emanuela Orlandi left her family’s home in Vatican City to take flute lessons. But that day she was too late: As she told her sister on the phone, she had received a job offer from the cosmetics company Avon, and shortly before class she met with a representative of the company. According to eyewitness reports, after she left music school, she got into a large, dark BMW. She was officially reported missing the following day.
Two days later, on June 25, 1983, a young man reported that he had seen Emanuela on the Piazza Navona in Rome. She had been to the hairdresser, introduced herself as “Barbarella” and said that she had run away from home and was now selling Avon products. Another witness said they met Emanuela on June 28 in a bar near the Vatican, where she posed as “Barbara”.
After that, Emanuela Orlandis lost track. In early July, her family received a series of calls from a group of alleged blackmailers claiming that they had kidnapped the girl in order to free Mehmet Ali Ağca, a member of the Turkish terrorist organization Gray Wolves. Ağca was serving a life sentence in Italy at the time because he had fatally injured Pope John Paul II in an assassination attempt two years previously. But the calls to the family soon stopped and the trail petered out.
The Italian mafia was also brought into play
Further investigations into Orlandi’s disappearance were unsuccessful. But over the years, more and more theories have emerged as to what the alleged kidnapping of the girl could be all about. One of them states that Emanuela was kidnapped to extort money that the mafia loaned to the Holy See. In 2012, police opened the grave of mob boss Enrico de Pedis after receiving a tip that the girl’s body was inside. But this turned out to be wrong.
Also in 2012, 85-year-old priest and exorcist Gabriele Amorth claimed that a group of Vatican police officers and foreign diplomats kidnapped the girl, sexually exploited her for parties, and later murdered her. Shortly thereafter, Mehmet Ali Ağca, who had since been released from prison, personally intervened and claimed that Orlandi was alive. She was actually kidnapped by the Gray Wolves and is in Turkey. Pope Francis, in turn, told Emanuela’s brother Pietro in 2013 that the girl was in heaven.
What did the Holy See know?
But the brother was not satisfied with this explanation. Pietro Orlandi repeatedly claimed that the Vatican was not telling him the truth. A claim that received a boost in 2017: The journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi was leaked a document according to which the Holy See is said to have spent the equivalent of a quarter of a million euros to house Emanuela Orlandi in a boarding school in England between 1983 and 1997. The last entry in the document indicated that after 14 years the girl was taken back to Rome and killed there. The Vatican denied the claims, Fittipaldi admitted doubts about the authenticity of the document.
Emanuela Orlandi’s brother Pietro does not want to give up the search for his sister.
But the Vatican could never completely shake off the suspicion that it knew more about the girl’s disappearance. “There is a grain of truth in each of these theories, but all leads lead to the Vatican,” claims Vatican Girl. Director Mark Lewis’ greatest asset is a new witness who testifies that her friend Emanuela was molested by a cardinal days before she mysteriously disappeared.
It is unclear what the investigation will bring
The true-crime documentary delves into all the theories that have been put forward about the Emanuela Orlandi case, and yet finds no answer to the mystery except that the Holy See must have been involved in some way. Emanuela’s brother sees it that way: “The only thing I know for sure is that the Vatican knows the truth,” says Pietro Orlandi in an episode of the series.
He is therefore satisfied with the Vatican’s announcement that it wants to reopen the case. “We filed two complaints, the first in 2018 and the second in 2019,” Italian news agencies quoted family lawyer Laura Sgrò as saying. “I don’t know on what basis they have now opened the procedure, we heard about it from the press. We’re curious too.”
Whether the investigations will bring new insights is completely open. The journalist Andrea Purgatori, who followed the case from the beginning, is convinced in “Vatican Girl”: “Sooner or later the truth will come out.”