Obscure Occurrences : The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi || The Vatican Girl

 Born on 14 January 1968, Emanuela Orlandi was the fourth of Ercole and Maria Orlandi’s five children. The Orlandis were citizens of Vatican City, an independent country that covers just over 100 acres, and they lived in a flat inside its walls. Ercole Orlandi worked at the Baskin prefecture in Vatican City where he dealt with the papal audiences and with his income, he took good care of his family. The family were living a peaceful and happy life under the wings of the Pope but things quickly changed after 22 June 1983.

Disappearance

 In the June of 1983, fifteen-year-old Emanuela had just finished her second year of high school at Liceo Scientifico in Rome. Being a talented musician who played piano and flute, she took flute lessons thrice a week at the Tommaso Ludovico Da Victoria School which was located a mile away from her home. To get to the music class, she normally took a bus from her home, got off after a few stops and then walked about 200 meters from the bus stop to her music school. However, at times when she was late to class, her brother Pietro Orlandi drove her to her class. Thus, when she ran late for her classes on 22 June 1983, she asked Pietro to drop her at her music class but as he had to meet his girlfriend, he refused. Annoyed by this, she left the house slamming the door. Unfortunately, this was the last time he ever saw her.

Real Picture of Emanuela Orlandi (Source: AP)

 She arrived at her class a little too late that day and according to her teacher, she seemed to be uncharacteristically disturbed. Also, she left the class 10 minutes before it finished but she didn’t directly head back home after the class. In fact, when her friends boarded the bus almost half an hour after she left the class, they saw her speaking to a red-haired woman near the bus stop. A few moments after she was last seen by her friends, she called home and told her sister Federica about a man in a green BMW who had stopped her just in front of the Italian Senate shortly before her music class. The man had asked her to distribute pamphlets for Avon products in a two-hour fashion show that weekend and he offered to pay her 375 lire in return. Although it seemed to be an alluring opportunity to make some quick money, Federica asked her not to commit to the job before discussing it with her parents and cut the call.

 Last seen getting into a dark-coloured BMW, Emanuela who was supposed to meet another sister at a nearby piazza at 7:30 pm that day, never turned up. In fact, she did not even return home that day giving her family “the worst day of their life”. The very next day, the family reported Emanuela as missing to the police who at first gestured that she might have been with her friend and told them that she would return soon. Her family, however, knew that this was not the case as it was extremely uncharacteristic of Emanuela to disappear like that. The family strongly felt that she was either involved in an accident or abducted but the police did not seem to take them seriously. However, it didn’t take too much convincing and the police declared Emanuela a missing person on the very same day.

Investigation

 Over the next couple of days, information about her disappearance leaked to the media and announcements with the phone number of the Orlandi house were published in local and national newspapers. That sounds like a great idea, right? No, it wasn’t. This resulted in the family receiving umpteen calls. While some of these calls were made by people who were trying to be helpful, a lot of them were calls from people trying to pull a prank on the suffering family.

 The first unusual call came on June 25^th of the same year from a 16-year-old boy named “Pierluigi”. He claimed that he and his girlfriend had seen a girl matching Emanuela’s description play the flute in the Campo del Fiore in Rome. According to him, the girl went by the name of Barbara and she was selling Avon products.

 Three days later, another man who called himself “Mario” called the Orlandi family and told them a similar story. He claimed to have seen a girl named Barbara who matched the description of Emanuela. In line with his claims, despite having a flute in her hand, she was selling Avon products while wearing thick glasses. The girl confided in him that she had run away from home as she needed some space but intended to return in time for her sister’s wedding.

 Following these strange calls, the walls of Rome were covered with over three thousand posters that displayed Emanuela’s photograph and information. Also, two agents from SISDE who claimed to be “investigating the white slave trade” turned up on the doorstep of the Orlandi family. The agents Mario Vulpiani and Giulio Gangi took a look around Emanuela’s room, attached a listening device to the family’s phone and left the house.

 Following the visit, Gangi canvassed nearby garages looking for information on the dark-coloured BMW that Emanuela was last seen getting into. During his investigation, he found a mechanic who had fixed the passenger window of a dark-coloured BMW that had been damaged from the inside. Could Emanuela have been in this car? Could there have been a struggle inside this car? To find the answers to these questions, Gangi went to the address linked to this car. The address led him to an apartment two kilometres behind the Vatican where an angry woman refused to answer his questions and chased him off the property. To add to the oddity, Gangi’s boss ordered him to never return to this apartment and he was soon removed from the case and given a desk job.

 11 days after Emanuela’s disappearance, during the Angelus, Pope John Paul II made a public statement about it. Before announcing her disappearance, the Pope stated that he was “close to the Orlandi family” and this portrayed that the Pope was emotionally invested in this case. He also appealed to the sense of the humanity of those behind her disappearance thus making the hypothesis of abduction official.

The Emergence of "The American"

 Two days later, the Orlandi family received another strange phone call but this time it was from an anonymous stranger who would go on to be dubbed “The American” because of his accent. He told the family that both Pierluigi and Mario belonged to his organization. In line with his claims, Emanuela was held captive by a terrorist group, the ultra-nationalist Turkish Gray Wolves. They were willing to free her in exchange for the release of Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who had attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981. Although this call was terrifying for the Orlandi family, it appeared to be the light at the end of the tunnel. This call meant that Emanuela was still alive and they could still get her back.

 A few hours after this call, The American called the Vatican directly and told them the same thing. Weirdly, Mehmet publicly declared that he didn’t want to be released from the Italian prison and he claimed that he didn’t know who the group were.

 Over the next couple of months, the family received many more calls from The American. In one of these calls, he played a brief tape of a girl saying, “I’m Emanuela Orlandi and I attend a science high school”. Although it sounded just like her, the police couldn’t confirm that she was alive with it. To solidify his claims, the man lead the police to a photocopy of Emanuela’s music school registration card, a receipt of her tuition and her handwritten note. After an anonymous tip, the police found these documents inside a basket in the public square near the Parliament. In a later call, The American played a recording which sounded like a woman was being tortured but the police dismissed it saying that it seemed to be a clip from a porn film.

 The American had one big request. He constantly asked the police to allow him to speak to the Vatican City Secretary of State, Cardinal Agostino and the police eventually agreed. He was given a direct telephone line to the Secretary of state but the content of the phone calls was never made public. The police attempted to track The American’s phone calls but they were made from different public telephone booths.

A Mysterious Stalker

 On 13^th August, this so-called terrorist group contacted ANSA, an Italian news agency, and demanded that the Pope publicly declare that just like Emanuela, Mehmet was also a human being. The Pope obliged this demand and declared the same on his noon-day prayer at Castel Gandolfo. With the pope bending to the will of The American, other terrorist organizations who were keenly following the media coverage until then started muddying the waters.

 They started making their own claims of holding Emanuela and things started to get complicated. One such organization named the “Turkish anti-Christian Liberation Front” wrote two letters from Frankfurt demanding the release of Mehmet and his accomplices. This organization claimed that they were also responsible for the disappearance of Mirella Gregori, a young girl who had gone missing in Rome just a month before Emanuela’s disappearance.

Posters of Mirella Gregori (Left) and Emanuela Orlandi (Right) (Source :Fanpage.it)

 On 7 May 1983, moments before her disappearance, fifteen-year-old Mirella left her house after telling her mom that she had a date with a former schoolmate. Mirella’s mother saw her getting picked up by a man who was part of the papal escort. This man was not just linked to Mirella’s disappearance.

 Emanuela had a close friend named Raphael who was the daughter of Angelo, the Pope’s personal butler. After the failed assassination attempt on the Pope by Mehmet, Raphael started noticing the same man following her on the bus to school and this happened on six different occasions. As Angelo had already heard rumours about the possible kidnap of his daughter, he immediately changed her school after hearing about this new stalker. With her new school present inside Vatican City, Raphael no longer had the need to leave its secure walls.

 Considering the fact that both the girls looked pretty similar and lived in the same building, it is possible that the apparent kidnappers directed their focus towards Emanuela after Raphael was no longer available. Also, Emanuela’s friends claimed to see a man stalk her on two separate instances with the last one being just three days before her disappearance. In line with their statement, three days before her disappearance, while Emanuela and her friends were walking to the Vatican, a car stopped near them. The mysterious stalker, who was sitting in the passenger seat, pointed to Emanuela and said to the driver, “It’s her”.

 With the case becoming more and more complicated with time, The American eventually became quiet. After his last call on October 27 1983, the police were left at a dead end. With not many clues to work with, the case eventually became cold and the Italian police finally ended their investigations in 1997.

Theories

 With Emanuela’s disappearance shrouded in obscurity for almost four decades, a number of theories have emerged with time.

Abducted by the Vatican

 The Vatican weren’t particularly helpful with the investigation of the case as they were less than willing to reveal all that they knew about the kidnap. In fact, one priest who worked in the central office at the Vatican was overheard being urged by his superiors to “deny any knowledge of the Vatican investigation” into Emanuela’s case.

 A memo on the case written by the Vatican’s official spokesperson Rev. Federico Lombardi was stolen by the Pope’s butler and made public in 2012. In this memo, he wrote,“ if the non-collaboration with the Italian authorities was a normal and justifiable affirmation of Vatican sovereignty, or if in fact circumstances were withheld might have helped clear something up”.

 Later, in 2017, an Italian investigative journalist published a five-page document that had apparently been held hidden in a locked Vatican cabinet for many years. This document suggested that the Pope had been involved in Emanuela's disappearance. Also, Pietro Orlandi strongly claimed that Pope John Paul II knew what happened to Emanuela. According to him, the Pope decided not to reveal it in order to save the image of the church.

Abducted by the KGB

 The magistrates who conducted the investigation into the Pope's failed assassination attempt concluded that Pope John Paul II was targeted because of his support of the Solidarity movement in Poland which destabilized the Communists. At a later trial, it was argued that three Bulgarians had hired Mehmet Ali Agca on behalf of the Soviet KGB to kill the Pope but when the assassination attempt failed, Manuela was abducted by them in order to blackmail the Pope into ending his support for the movement.

 Later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, one of the investigators of this case travelled to Berlin to interview a former member of the Stasi Intelligence Agency This agent claimed the letters from the Turkish Grey Wolves were actually written by the Stasi. The goal was apparently to drive attention from the Soviet spy agencies to the Islamist fanatics.

Organized Crime

 From the late 1970s to the early 1970s, a crime organization named “Banda della Magliana” operated across Rome and Italy as a whole. Linked to Mafias, politicians and intelligence services, they had a lot of money under their control, a majority of which they invested in the Banco Ambrosiano. One of the main stakeholders of this bank was the Vatican’s Institute for the work of Religion.

 When the bank eventually crashed and millions of pounds were lost, the gang realized that the only way to recoup their losses was through the Vatican, one of the main stakeholders of the bank. The Vatican apparently had already been warned about being targeted by the gang but they had not taken it seriously. Thus, in order to force the Vatican into the restitution of money, the gang had apparently kidnapped Emanuela, a Vatican Citizen whose father was an acquaintance of the Pope.

 To further solidify this theory, Sabrina, the former lover of the gang’s leader De Pedis, claimed to have seen Emanuela in their custody. She also claimed to see them dump her body in a cement mixer on the construction site. With Sabrina’s memory damaged because of persistent drug abuse, many stepped up to solidify her claims. Also, the composite sketch of the man in the green-coloured BMW resembled De Pedis.

 De Pedis was eventually killed in 1990 by a rival gang member and he was controversially buried in the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare. Later, in 2005, an anonymous caller on an Italian television program told that De Pedis’ grave would help the police solve Emanuela’s disappearance. On 14 May 2012, the tomb was eventually opened by the police but no traces of Emanuela’s disappearance was found inside it. Two more tombs that apparently had the bones of two princesses were opened in 2019 after an anonymous tip-off but this "only deepened the mystery as even the bones of two princesses thought to be there were missing".