Photo by Wikimedia Commons
It was March 2013, and Pope Francis was saying his first Mass after his selection to lead the Catholic Church. Outside a small church in Vatican City, Pietro Orlandi waited with his mother, hoping to meet the new pope and ask him for help in finding his sister Emanuela. She had disappeared, at 15 years old, on the streets of Rome 30 years earlier.
Francis recognized them in the crowd and told Orlandi’s mother, “Emanuela is in heaven.” Then he said it again to Pietro: “Emanuela is in heaven.”
“It chilled my blood,” Pietro Orlandi later told the Italian newspaper Repubblica. Was Francis obliquely confirming that the Vatican knew something about her disappearance? Or was he simply trying to offer words of comfort to a family famous for its crusade to find the missing girl?
Pope Francis didn’t mention Emanuela Orlandi again publicly in the 10 years after that meeting, her family said — despite their repeated appeals — until one week in 2023 when he said during his Sunday blessing that he wanted “to express once again my closeness to the family, especially to the mother, and to assure them of my prayers.”
The Orlandi mystery has been a national obsession in Italy for 40 years, as of June 2023 but it went international in 2022 with the release of the Netflix documentary “Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi.” In the four-part series, Orlandi’s family members, their attorney, police investigators and several Italian journalists go through the case, all of them concluding that the Vatican knows more than it has said.
Vatican conspiracy theories have a long history, even before the Dan Brown book “The DaVinci Code” flew off the shelves. Rumors of murder or suicide have long surrounded the death of Pope John Paul I, who died in 1978 after only a month as pope, without a shred of evidence. And despite at least three investigations, no one has ever been charged in connection with Emanuela’s disappearance.
Vatican City is one of the smallest sovereign states in the world, comprising about 100 acres embedded inside the Italian capital. Most of its citizens are clergy — priests, cardinals, bishops — but there is also a small number of non-clergy Vatican employees who live there with their families. The Orlandi family had lived and worked in the city for more than 100 years, serving seven popes as ushers and messengers, according to the documentary. In the 1980s, usher Ercole Orlandi lived in an apartment there with his wife, son and four daughters. Emanuela was the second youngest.
On the afternoon of June 22, 1983, Emanuela went to a music lesson in Rome. Sometime in the early evening, she called home to say that a man had offered her a quick job handing out leaflets for Avon cosmetics and that she would be late. When she didn’t return home that night, the family immediately began searching for her. They went to the police, ran ads in the newspaper and covered the city in posters emblazoned with Emanuela’s tranquil face.
Emanuela was a Vatican citizen, but since she had been last seen in Rome, the Vatican left the investigation to Italian authorities, who at first suspected the girl had run away.
Kidnapping for ransom wasn’t uncommon in Italy at that time (see the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III), but when a man with an American accent began calling the Orlandi home soon afterward, claiming he knew where Emanuela was, he didn’t demand money. Instead, he demanded the release from prison of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish man who two years earlier had attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II.
“The American,” as the family came to call him, played a recording that sounded like Emanuela saying the name of her school and sent the media a photocopy of her school ID with a note in her handwriting. Another tape sent to the media revealed sounds of a young woman crying out in pain.
Then-Pope John Paul II made a public appeal “in the name of God and humanity” that the kidnappers return Emanuela unharmed, The Washington Post reported at the time.
Agca, who claimed to have been trained by Soviet intelligence, was not released by Italian authorities, and “the American” eventually stopped calling.
Over the years, bizarre clues and even more bizarre theories of her disappearance have emerged, a few of which were detailed in the Netflix series. In one theory, an Italian journalist followed an anonymous tip to the former girlfriend of an Italian crime family boss, who claimed she had helped hide Emanuela at several locations in Rome before delivering her to a man dressed as a priest at a Vatican gas station.
Some journalists have speculated, without evidence, that her case could be connected to an Italian banking scandal and that Pope John Paul II may have used Mafia money to fund anti-communist groups in his native Poland. The Mafia kidnapped a Vatican citizen to get their money back, that theory goes.
Another journalist, who received from secret Vatican sources a bevy of documents in the 2012 scandal dubbed “Vatileaks,” claimed in 2017 to have gotten an expense document showing Emanuela was living in London under the care of Catholic priests until 1997, when she appears to have died. The Vatican called the document “false and ridiculous.”
The filmmakers also spoke with a childhood friend of Emanuela’s, who claimed that shortly before Emanuela’s disappearance, she had confessed that a man close to the pope had molested her.
Then there’s Marco Accetti, who in 2013 claimed to be “the American” from the ransom calls. He had kidnapped Emanuela and another girl on behalf of a secretive Vatican faction for reasons he couldn’t reveal, he told Italian media, and even produced a flute case that the Orlandi family confirmed looked like one with which Emanuela disappeared. But when asked to provide details of Emanuela’s condition that only “the American” and her family would know, Accetti had no answers.
In the Netflix doc, Pietro Orlandi told the filmmakers he now believed Accetti may have been involved in the disappearance of the other girl but not in his sister’s.
In 2019, an attorney representing the Orlandi family received an anonymous tip suggesting Emanuela’s remains were buried in a small Vatican cemetery for long-dead German royalty. Incredibly, the Vatican, which previously had declined to participate in any of the investigations into Emanuela’s disappearance, agreed to open the tombs. But the tombs were empty; even the remains of the German princesses who were supposed to be buried there were missing.
In January 2023, a few months after the release of the documentary, the Vatican announced that it would open an investigation into Emanuela’s disappearance and last week said it had uncovered new leads “worthy of further investigation,” according to the Associated Press. Rome prosecutors have also reopened the case, and now, days after Pope Francis’s acknowledgment, Italy’s parliament may soon open a formal inquest into the case.
“A taboo has fallen,” the Orlandi family’s attorney told the AP. “It wasn’t a given, and we are grateful to Pope Francis for this gesture.”