Emanuela Orlandi was born in Rome in January 1968. Her father, Ercole, worked as a lay clerk in the papal household, and she was one of five siblings. Home was an apartment within the Vatican walls, which made her a Vatican citizen. She sang in a Vatican church choir and studied the flute at a music school attached to the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, in Piazza di Sant’Apollinare beside Piazza Navona.
What happened
On the afternoon of Wednesday June 22, 1983 Emanuela left home late for her lesson. After class she rang her sister Federica to say a man claiming to work for the cosmetics firm Avon had offered her a well-paid job handing out leaflets at a fashion show. Federica told her not to take it. Emanuela was last seen at about 7:30 pm at a bus stop on Corso del Rinascimento, near the Senate building, talking with another girl who was never identified. Police later collected reports of a girl like her speaking with a man carrying an Avon bag beside a dark green BMW.
The investigation
On July 3, 1983 Pope John Paul II publicly appealed to whoever was holding her, which made the idea of a kidnapping official. Soon afterward an anonymous caller, whom the press called “the American”, told the family and the Vatican that Emanuela would be released in exchange for Mehmet Ali Ağca, the Turkish gunman jailed for shooting the pope in 1981. He played a recording he said was her voice. A group calling itself the Turkesh Front sent further messages, which investigators came to regard as fabricated. Another 15-year-old Roman girl, Mirella Gregori, had disappeared about six weeks earlier, and the two cases were soon linked in public appeals, though a connection has never been established.
No exchange took place, and Italian inquiries opened and closed without result, the last of them in 2015. In 2005 an anonymous caller to the television program Chi l’ha visto? said the answer lay in the crypt of the basilica of Sant’Apollinare, where Enrico De Pedis, a boss of the Banda della Magliana gang, had been buried with church permission. In 2008 De Pedis’s former girlfriend Sabrina Minardi claimed the gang had taken Orlandi, a story that shifted as she told it. The tomb was opened in 2012, and DNA testing found no trace of Orlandi.
In 2019, after the family received an anonymous note saying a clue lay in a tomb beside a statue of an angel, the Vatican agreed to open two 19th-century tombs in the Teutonic Cemetery inside its walls. On July 11 both, belonging to Princess Sophie von Hohenlohe and Princess Charlotte Frederica of Mecklenburg, were found empty of any remains. Two ossuaries found soon afterward under the floor of the neighboring college held hundreds of bones and thousands of fragments. A forensic anthropologist dated all of them to before the end of the 19th century, and the Vatican closed its inquiry the following year.
The explanations
Some theories involve international politics. In these, Orlandi was taken as leverage over the Vatican, whether for Ağca’s release or in connection with the Vatican Bank’s troubles of the early 1980s. A second group puts Rome’s underworld at the center, with De Pedis’s gang acting for someone else. Others suggest something closer to home: a predator who lured a teenager with a job offer, and a later cloud of hoaxers and fantasists who used the case for their own ends. In 2013 a photographer, Marco Accetti, claimed to have taken part in the kidnapping. His account, like many others, has not been proven.
Her brother Pietro has campaigned for four decades, insisting the Holy See knows more than it has said. The Vatican has said it wants the truth found, while categorically rejecting any suggestion that it bears responsibility.
Where it stands
Renewed public interest after the 2022 Netflix series Vatican Girl was followed by fresh activity. In January 2023 the Vatican’s Promoter of Justice, Alessandro Diddi, opened an investigation, partly at the family’s request. Rome prosecutors opened another that spring, and the Italian parliament set up a commission of inquiry into the Orlandi and Gregori cases. In June 2023, on the 40th anniversary, Diddi sent the material gathered from Vatican offices to Rome’s prosecutors and said some lines of inquiry were worth pursuing. With three inquiries open and no body, suspect or confirmed lead, what happened to Emanuela Orlandi is unproven.