The Mysterious Disappearance Of Emanuela Orlandi In The Vatican

The Mysterious Disappearance Of Emanuela Orlandi In The Vatican

A young Emanuela Orlandi, before she became one of the most famous missing person cases in the world.

On a sweltering summer evening in June 1983, 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi vanished from Vatican City in central Rome after attending a routine music lesson.

The daughter of a well-known Vatican employee, Orlandi enjoyed the religious center’s idyllic gardens and often ran into Pope John Paul II. Her brother Pietro recalled their city is more of a village, inhabited by a close-knit group of around six families.

But Orlandi’s disappearance on June 22 of that year launched decades of kaleidoscopic conspiracy theories that include the Italian Mafia, Vatican Satanists, sex trafficking, and sacrifice.

On the last day anyone saw her, Orlandi called her sister after her music class to tell her that a representative from Avon Cosmetics had offered her a job. When Orlandi failed to return home the following day, her parents called the teacher from her class and the police. Her bizarre disappearance was declared a missing person case that day.

A witness initially reported seeing a girl matching Orlandi’s description entering a green BMW near the music school on the night of her disappearance, but that bit of information would lead nowhere.

Shortly after this maddening detail emerged, the Orlandis received an ominous phone call promising to return the girl if the Vatican released Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish national who was languishing in prison for having attempted to murder the pope two years earlier. Unfortunately, that development proved fruitless as well.

It has since been indicated that the Rome-based crime syndicate Banda Della Magliana kidnapped Orlandi to force the Vatican to pay them back for an outstanding loan. The girlfriend of the leader of that criminal organization, Enrico De Pedis, later claimed that De Pedis told her that Orlandi was indeed abducted and murdered.

The most hair-raising theories, however, claim that the Vatican, local police, and high-profile lawmakers kidnapped Orlandi and forced her into sexual servitude. At least, this is what the Vatican’s chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth believes. Amorth was appointed by Pope John Paul II himself.

“This was a crime with a sexual motive,” Amorth insisted. “Parties were organized, with a Vatican gendarme acting as the ‘recruiter’ of the girls. The network involved diplomatic personnel from a foreign embassy to the Holy See. I believe Emanuela ended up as a victim of this circle.”

In 2019, a promising tip indicated that Orlandi had been buried in a Vatican tomb. Tragically, this tip too yielded no results. Her family has organized demonstrations in recent years, hoping to spur a renewed inquiry into her unsolved disappearance, but to no avail.