The Mysterious Disappearance Of Emanuela Orlandi In The Vatican
A young Emanuela Orlandi, before she became one of the most famous missing persons cases in the world.
On a sweltering summer evening in June 1983, 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi disappeared from Vatican City in central Rome after attending a routine music lesson.
The daughter of a prominent Vatican employee, Orlandi enjoyed the religious center’s idyllic gardens and often ran into Pope John Paul II. Her brother Pietro recalled their city being 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 mysterious 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 surfaced, 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 assassinate the pope two years earlier. Unfortunately, that development proved fruitless as well.
It has since been suggested 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 kidnapped and killed.
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