Emanuela Orlandi, 15, disappeared on June 22, 1983, in the Vatican, after a music lesson. Since then, the case has given rise to multiple theories, as well as a documentary on Netflix, without any leads. Almost 40 years later, on Tuesday January 10, the promoter of justice of the Vatican, the equivalent of a prosecutor, “opened an investigation” demanded for decades by the family, said the press service of the Holy See.
“We don’t know what the Vatican is going to do,” reacted the family lawyer, Laura Sgro, who will ask, “in the next few hours, to meet the promoter of justice “to understand“. Because “so far, the Vatican has done nothing”she lamented. “I have been asking for years that certain personalities belonging to the top of the Vatican be heard (…) unfortunately some have died in the meantime”.
Several leads and theories, but no proof
Several avenues have already been explored to try to find a trace of this young girl, whose father worked for the Vatican. In vain. A former mistress of the sulphurous Enrico De Pedis, a man killed in 1990 and suspected in particular of belonging to a mafia organization and sectors of Vatican finance, thus claimed that he had kidnapped the young girl and sunk her body in concrete.
In 2012, Italian justice opened the tomb of Enrico De Pedis, without being able to advance the investigation. According to some theses, the teenager was kidnapped by the criminal group to recover a loan from the former American president of the Vatican bank, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus.
Another theory evokes a kidnapping of the teenager to snatch the release of Mehmet Ali Agça, the Turk who had tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981. In an open letter, the man, released in 2010, had assured in 2019 that Emanuela Orlandi was alive and that it was necessary to seek her trace in the archives of the CIA.
This disappearance was the subject of a series in 2022 on Netflix. Emanuela’s brother claims that Pope Francis told him : “She’s in Heaven”implying, according to the family, that the Vatican knows what has become of the girl.
