JUNE 22nd, 1983
ROME, ITALY
At the end of a hot summer's day, almost 40 years ago, a fifteen year old schoolgirl leaves her music class in the Italian capital. She is happy - it is the school holidays and the good weather is here to stay.
Juventus have just won the Serie A for the third consecutive year, a hotly contested general election is only a week away, and American brands like McDonalds are finally arriving in Italy.
Little did Emmanuela Orlandi know, on that sunny evening, that she would never be seen again.
Her disappearence was to become one of the most sensational and explosive investigations in Italian police history - engulfing ruthless gangsters, shadowy terrorists, and the Catholic Church.
Decades later, investigators still have no idea what happened to her. However, over the years a number of theories have
emerged, each more shocking and lurid than the last.
What we do know is that Emmanuela was the daughter of Ercole Orlandi, an employee of the Vatican bank. She and her four siblings
were citizens and residents of the Vatican City, a microstate nestled in the heart of Rome and ruled by the powerful Catholic Church. She was in her second year of high school, and led a typical youthful life. She was close with her family, particularly her older brother Pietro, and enjoyed hanging out in the city's many parks and cafes with friends.
On that fateful summer afternoon, Emanuela left the family's small apartment in Vatican City and traveled to her music school in the centre of Rome for a flute lesson. On the way to class, a man in a green BMW pulled up beside her and offered her money to sell cosmetics for a major company. Despite being among the elite few who call the Vatican home, the Orlandi family were not wealthy by any means and such an offer could only be tempting to a teenager from a crowded home. Because this encounter made her late for her lesson, she rang one of her sisters and asked her to let her parents know about the offer.
Once she finished the class, at around 6:50 p.m, friends saw her get on her usual bus. One of her peers noticed, as she disappeared from view against the congested urban streets, that Emmanuela started talking to a mysterious, red-haired female passenger.
She never arrived home.
The next day, after a sleepless night, her parents called the director of the music school to see if any students knew where Emmanuela was. Although, as a typical 15 year old, she'd had a rebellious streak she had never ran away before. When police were notified they instructed the parents to relax and wait, suggesting that "perhaps the girl was with friends". Later that day, when it became apparent that this was not the case, she was declared missing. Over the next two days, Rome's newspaper's were flooded with appeals for help in locating the Orlandi's beloved daughter.
SATURDAY JUNE 25th
Police receive a call from a young man named 'Pierluigi'.
He claims to have seen Emmanuela on Rome's iconic Piazza Navona. He is able to give details regarding her beloved flute, her despised glasses, and her hair style that confirm his authenticity. He claims she approached him and his fiance, calling herself 'Barbarella' and told the couple she had run away from home to sell cosmetic products.
Three days later...
'Mario' calls the Orlandi family, claiming to own a bar near Ponte Vittorio - roughly halfway between the Vatican and Emmanuela's music school. He tells them an unfamiliar girl matching their daughter's description calling herself 'Barbara' had entered his establishment and confided in him that she had gone missing from her family. However, she insisted to him that she would return for her eldest sister's impending wedding.
Within 48 hours, nearly 3000 posters of Emmanuela had been plastered across Rome - with the story of the missing schoolgirl projected across every news kiosk and television programme.
JULY 3RD
With every day trickling by for the worry stricken Orlandi family, Pope John Paul II follows a prayer service with a public statement. Declaring he is 'close' to the girl's family, he demands that she is returned home safely. This marks the first incidence when the question of foul play or abduction is raised publicly. The Pope would go onto make 8 further appeals, highlighting the small community of the Vatican that would later bring a darker element of theory to the case...
As soon as the case became a national sensation, the Orlandi family and local police began receiving numerous cryptic anonymous phone calls.
It was at this time that investigators and the media began to see the murky extents of the summer mystery.
Thus began a string of theories that would baffle investigators, and still raise troubling questions to this day.
THE TERRORISTS
One lead followed by detectives was a claim made by individuals claiming to be of the same terror organisation as Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk gunman who had attempted to assassinate John Paul II in 1981.
A shadowy negotiator, dubbed 'L'Americano' by police due to his unusual accent, played supposed clips of Emmanuela's voice and offered her release in exchange for Agca's - giving the Pope a 20 Day window to act.
On the 6th of July 'the American' went to the press and declared previous witnesses 'Pierluigi' and 'Mario' to be fellow members of his terror group. He also led reporters to a basket dumped near the Italian Parliament, containing Emmanuela's music school ID card, a receipt she made, and a supposedly handwritten note from the girl. Despite the media furore of this incident, the case's magistrate deemed the organisation's claim to kidnap as unbelievable and nothing followed after the Pope's supposed 20 day window of action. However Agca, the would be pope assassin, told media in the 1990s that Orlandi had indeed been abducted by agents of the Turkish ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves organisation. He claimed that she was safe, and living in a cloistered convent somewhere in the Balkans. With no evidence to support these claims, the case was again dismissed. Over the years during his imprisonment in Istanbul, and release in 2010 Agca made a stream of contradictory and bizarre comments to the media regarding the Orlandi case. At one point he said she was a prisoner of the Catholic Church in a Central European monastery, and at other times claiming she was living among the Muslim community in Paris under a new identity. Agca's claims have been supported by one Italian judge, but have otherwise been dismissed.
THE MAFIA
In 2011, twenty four years after her disappearance, former Mafia member Antonio Mancini claimed his organisation had been responsible for Emmanuela's abduction. The 'Banda Della Magliana' had been Rome's most infamous mob in the early 1980s, and Orlandi's abduction was said to be one of a series of attacks the gang had made on the Vatican in pursuit of money they'd lost due to the activities of 'God's Banker' Roberto Calvi. The Milanese financier, who'd worked closely with the Vatican Bank where the girl's father was a clerk, had been found hanging from London's Blackfriar's Bridge just a year before Orlandi's disappearance, in a similarly unsolved case involving organised crime and the church. The chairman of the collapsed 'Banco Ambrosio' had been a member of a Masonic Lodge containing the highest echelons of Italian society and politics. In 2012 forensic teams investigated the tomb of Magliana mobster Enrico De Pedis, based on a tip off by his former girlfriend that he had admitted involvement in Orlandi's abduction. De Pedis, a notorious thug who was gunned down at just 35, may seem an unlikely character to be buried in a 7th century sacred church. His relationship to the Vatican, and to the controversial Monsignor Marcinkus, yield a further theory that is perhaps most dramatic of all...
THE CHURCH
Sabrina Minardi was a young woman from a working class Roman neighbourhood. She was also a state witness against Enrico De Pedis, her deceased lover. In her police statement she asserted that the mafioso 'knew and confided in' Monsignor Marcinkus, the Chicago born archbishop who was no stranger to controversy. According to Minardi, her boyfriend had acted as a pimp to high ranking Vatican officials and had abducted Emmanuela on orders from Marcikus. She claims she encountered the 'frightened' schoolgirl days after she'd become Italy's most famous missing person, in a bar on Gianicolo Hill above the Vatican, in the company of De Pedis. The gangster urged her to 'forget who you have just seen.'
Marcinkus, who had been a senior figure at the Vatican Bank during the Calvi scandal, had been questioned over mafia money laundering charges in the 1970s. He had also been implicated by some criminals as a conspirator in the supposed murder of Pope John Paul I, who died under suspicious circumstances in 1978.
Father Gabriel Amorth, an outspoken priest and Vatican 'exorcist', believes Emmanuela Orlandi was a victim of a crime with 'sexual motive'. His theory is that the teenager was abducted by somebody she knew, and was used for Vatican sex parties prior to being killed by De Pedis or one of his associates.
She was one of the Vatican's few young female residents, and in his eyes would have been a target for the 'Satanic sects' that exist within the Church's upper echelons.
De Pedis was murdered near Campo Di Fiori, Rome's main marketplace, in 1990 by former associates and despite his life of crime was given a diamond encrusted grave in the Vatican. Marcinkus died of natural causes in 2006 at an Arizona retirement community.
The link between the Mafia and Vatican, and their possible collusion in Emmanuela's disappearance, is still unclear.
What we do know is that, in the summer of 1983, an innocent young girl vanished from her loved ones and all she knew. Whether she is alive in hiding, or dead in an unmarked grave, is still the burning question for her family and for Italian society.
The Vatican Police, who Emmanuela would have been familiar with during her short life living between the state's walls, claim they have fully cooperated with Italian detectives and that their own investigations have been inconclusive.
We may never know what exactly happened when she got onto that bus. Did she run away from home naturally, with the help of mysterious cosmetic salespeople? Is she still the hostage of an obscure Turkish terror group, living a secluded life at total odds with her ordinary urban upbringing?
Or are we to believe the worst? Either that she was simply another victim of criminal thugs in their war against an organisation who lost their money? Or worse. That an international state entity purportedly devoted to God snatched this young life, used it for their own depraved purposes, and simply disposed of the evidence?
The case is kept alive by activists and the media, but as the years and decades pass each revelation only adds another layer to this dark, unsolved, Roman mystery.
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