Did the Vatican cover up the kidnap and torture of this girl by the Mafia because she’d been sexually abused by a friend of the Pope?
As a Netflix documentary spurs the Church in Rome to re-examine a haunting case...
The bedroom looks just as it did when 15year- old emanuela Orlandi left it on a swelteringly hot afternoon in June 1983 — the dolls and stuffed toys on the shelves above her single bed are a reminder that she was little more than a child at the time of her disappearance.
Much of the rest of her family’s apartment in Rome’s Vatican City also remains a shrine to emanuela. In the living room there is the piano played by the talented young musician, and for years her mother Maria, now 92, kept the key to their home on a hook outside the front door in case her daughter ever returned.
That hope was in vain. If emanuela was still alive today, she would be in her mid-50s, probably with children of her own. But the last that her closeknit family ever saw of her was when she went out for a flute lesson on that fateful Wednesday, only to disappear soon afterwards.
The search for the teenager in the four decades since has taken so many twists and turns that it has been compared to The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s novel about a centuries-long Vatican cover- up concerning the whereabouts of the holy Grail.
But it’s a real-life papal conspiracy that holds the secret to emanuela
Orlandi’s fate, according to Vatican Girl, a new Netflix documentary series directed by Mark Lewis, who won an emmy for his previous Netflix series Don’t F**k With Cats.
Its most extraordinary claims are that the Vatican had emanuela spirited away to London, where she remained alive for 14 years. And that when she died at the age of 29, her body was then returned to Rome, where her family remained tormented about what had happened to her, even as they continued to live only a few hundred yards from the men who withheld the truth.
And now the documentary’s findings have prompted an extraordinary turnaround by the Vatican. After decades of ignoring the heartfelt and repeated demands of the family, they have this week finally agreed to open a full inquiry into the case, promising to ‘leave no stone unturned’ in finding out what happened to their only citizen considered missing.
But it remains to be seen how exhaustive and open these investigations will be, given explosive new evidence that emanuela was sexually abused by a senior Vatican figure close to Pope John Paul II shortly before she vanished.
her family’s apartment in Vatican City — the independent papal state covering an area of only 0.2 square miles — was a perk of her father’s job as a papal clerk, continuing a family tradition that stretched back more than 100 years and had seen the Orlandis serving under seven popes.
The fourth of ercole and Maria Orlandi’s five children, emanuela, enjoyed what seemed to many to be an idyllic upbringing, in which the youngsters were given the run of the Vatican Gardens.
‘We felt we were in the safest place in the world,’ said emanuela’s older brother Pietro. But her best friend from school, talking anonymously on camera for the first time, reveals on
Vatican Girl that about a week before she disappeared emanuela told her that she had ‘a secret to confess’. That, as she walked through the Vatican Gardens, she had been ‘bothered’ by someone very close to the Pope.
Asked whether this harassment was sexual, the woman says: ‘Absolutely, yes. She told me, maybe to feel better, maybe thinking that I’d free her of this thing,’ she continues while weeping. ‘But I didn’t do anything.’
On the day she disappeared, emanuela attended her music lesson as planned. Afterwards, she was supposed to meet her younger sister, Cristina, and her friends at a bridge about 10 minutes’ walk from the Vatican — but she never turned up.
When she still hadn’t returned home by midnight, Pietro and one of their cousins jumped on a motorbike and went searching for her. ‘It’s as if I was living a sort of nightmare,’ says Pietro. ‘God, what happened to emanuela, why isn’t she here?’
It seems the answer may be provided by gangster’s moll Sabrina Minardi. She was the lover of enrico ‘Renatino’ De Pedis, head of the Banda della Magliana gang and Rome’s most feared crime boss, until he was gunned down by rivals in 1990.
In the Netflix documentary, Minardi describes how, on the night of the kidnapping, she and De Pedis were at a lake near Rome when his driver turned up in a car with a young girl matching emanuela’s description in the back.
According to Minardi, she was ordered to accompany the girl to Torvaianica, a beach resort about an hour’s drive from Rome. Minardi’s parents had a holiday home, then vacant, in the town. There they were met by a woman Minardi remembers only as ‘Adelaide’. She locked emanuela in one of the bedrooms and drugged her to keep her quiet.
‘I could hear her moaning,’ recalls Minardi. ‘She moaned a lot.’
Minardi claims that she had no idea who the girl was, or that she had been kidnapped, but the family were left in no doubt when, two weeks after emanuela had disappeared, they received a phone call from a man who played them a tape recording of their daughter endlessly repeating the phrase: ‘I should be in the third year of high school next year.’ Although he refused to say who his organisation was, this was intended as proof that they held the terrified teenager, and he issued a chilling ultimatum. emanuela would be killed unless the authorities released Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca, who had shot and seriously wounded John Paul II two years earlier.
The documentary suggests that this was all a smokescreen designed to put the police off their scent.
Meanwhile, De Pedis’s organisation, the Mafia- affiliated Banda della Magliana, secretly negotiated with the Vatican for what they really wanted. The return of billions of pounds that the Mafia had laundered through the Vatican-sponsored Banco Ambrosiano, one of Italy’s largest private banks.
Around half a billion pounds of those illegally gotten gains had allegedly been borrowed by the Vatican to fund Solidarity, the burgeoning anticommunist trade union movement in John Paul II’s native Poland.
And when the Banco Ambrosiano unexpectedly went bust in 1982, and the Vatican showed no signs of repaying the Mafia’s money, it was left to De Pedis’s Magliana to blackmail the Vatican by kidnapping one of their own.
The series suggests that, although they could have snatched a cardinal or other senior cleric, they may have found in emanuela a victim who gave them even more leverage over the Vatican because of what she could reveal about her sexual abuse.
emanuela’s family say they knew nothing of that abuse at the time, but within the close-knit confines of Vatican City, with its population of less than 800, it’s plausible that rumours reached the Magliana, because De Pedis had strong connections within the senior ranks of the Vatican.
emanuela certainly seems to have been specifically targeted. Shortly before his death in 2008, a former Magliana gang member confessed that he had been ordered to tail her through the streets of Rome in the period before she disappeared and that finally he had abducted her.
A few days after the first phone contact with her family, another member of the gang called an Italian journalist and directed him to a rubbish bin not far from the famous Trevi Fountain. There he found a package containing another audio cassette, this time featuring what sounded like a terrifying recording of emanuela being tortured.
This may have been recorded in the basement of a large house in suburban Rome where, according to Sabrina Minardi, emanuela was transferred approximately ten days after the abduction. There, as in Torvaianica, she was kept permanently drugged.
‘She was so bewildered,’ says Minardi. ‘She wasn’t able to take care of herself because they pumped her so full of drugs.’
At some point in August, two months after the abduction, De Pedis told Minardi to drive the still heavily drugged emanuela to a Vatican-owned petrol station. Parked there was a black Mercedes with Vatican City number plates, out of which stepped a priest who put emanuela into the car and drove off with her. Minardi says that was the last she saw of the gang’s captive.
Whether they had secretly brokered a deal with the Vatican is not clear, but we do know that emanuela was never returned home to her family.
her father, ercole, died in 2004 without ever knowing what happened to emanuela. But, towards the end of his life, it seems he may have had his suspicions. ‘My father had always trusted the investigators and the Vatican to somehow help us bring emanuela back home,’ says Pietro. ‘But before he died . . . he said: “I was betrayed by those I served.” ’
If it’s true that the Vatican had paid off the kidnappers to get emanuela back, they still had a problem on their hands — how to stop her talking about the sexual abuse. And intriguing evidence that they did so by keeping her away from Rome and her family comes from a top-secret document apparently stolen from the Vatican by a whistleblower.
In 2015, this came into the hands
‘We felt we were in the safest place in the world’
She went to her f lute lesson and didn’t come back
of an investigative journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi, and it includes a list of expenses to ‘support the departure from home of Emanuela Orlandi’.
Extraordinarily, these payments made between 1983 and 1997 related to the 14 years Emanuela appears to have spent in London. They included medical bills, travel expenses and tuition fees, plus room and board at a hostel for young Catholic women run by the Scalabrini Fathers in Clapham, and then at the Institute of St Marcellina, a school in Hampstead run by nuns.
Fittipaldi made enquiries at both addresses but no record could be found of Emanuela, probably, he believed, because she could have been registered under another name.
The same may have applied to another item listed: a visit to Professor Lesley Regan, one of the most prominent gynaecologists in Britain. When shown a photo of Emanuela, Regan said that she didn’t recognise her but pointed out she’d had so many patients, many of them Italian, that she couldn’t possibly recall all their faces.
Ominously, the last entry refers to ‘the transfer to the Vatican City State’ and ‘final procedures’ in 1997. Fittipaldi believes that Emanuela may have died in London and that this could refer to the return of her body to the Vatican where it was buried unbeknown to her family.
Since the Vatican is notoriously full of vying factions, it’s possible that these documents were forged by one interest group and deliberately released to Fittipaldi to cause trouble. And if Emanuela really was alive until 1997, it raises the question why she did not attempt to escape her new life or contact her family.
‘The sexual secret is absolutely the key,’ says the documentary’s director Mark Lewis. ‘If it is true, this was a secret so dark that the Vatican would have been able to pressure her to remain silent, saying that if she returned home and spoke out,
it would not only bring down the Pope but her father would lose his job and her family their home.’
Whatever the truth, the family can only hope that they will find answers in the new inquiry by the Holy See.
In 2013, they attended a mass in the Vatican presided over by the newly elected Pope Francis. They had hoped to have a conversation with the pontiff about Emanuela afterwards, but when they presented themselves in front of him, he uttered only four words to the family: ‘Emanuela is in heaven.’
‘It froze my blood to hear the Pope say that Emanuela was dead,’ says Pietro. ‘As a head
Pope Francis said: ‘She is in heaven’
of state, saying in this moment that Emanuela is dead, means he knows something we don’t.’
Further confirmation of this appeared to come in 2019, when an anonymous tip- off received by the family’s lawyer suggested that Emanuela was buried in a particular crypt in one of the two cemeteries on Vatican grounds.
When the Vatican finally agreed to open it after a year of pleading by the family, it contained neither Emanuela’s coffin, nor those of the two 19th- century German princesses who were supposed to be there.
According to Pietro, it looked as though the tomb had been ‘vacuumed’, fuelling suspicion that the tomb’s re- opening had been authorised only once Emanuela had been removed and buried elsewhere.
‘The only thing I’m sure of is that in the Vatican they know the truth.’ says Pietro.
‘If Emanuela is dead, may they tell us so that my mum can at least bring a flower to her grave.’