The disappearance of an adolescent who became known as the “Vatican Girl,” one of Italy’s longest-running mysteries, has Pope Francis determined to solve it, according to the chief prosecutor of the Vatican.
Emanuela Orlandi, a 15-year-old who was headed home from a flute lesson in Rome in 1983, was the daughter of an usher who resided inside the city-state.
The family’s search for answers has taken several turns over the past four decades as a result of the countless conspiracy theories that have been sparked by her case.
After the Netflix series “Vatican Girl” debuted, it attracted new interest on a global scale last year.
And in January this year, Pope Francis launched the Vatican’s first formal investigation into the disappearance.
His top prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi, said his office would try to ‘give answers’ to the family.
Speaking to Italy’s Corriere della Sera ahead of a meeting with Emanuela’s brother, Diddi said Francis has an ‘iron will’ regarding the case and wants ‘the truth to emerge without any reservations’.
Family lawyer Laura Sgro told reporters afterwards: ‘We hope this can shed light on this episode and write a page of history.’
She said the Vatican’s openness and the pope’s determination was ‘absolutely positive’.
There have been countless theories about what happened to Emanuela.
In the 1980s, reports emerged in the Italian media that she had been kidnapped as part of a bid to free Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk jailed two years earlier for trying to assassinate Pope John Paul II.
Others linked her to the grave of infamous Italian gangster, Enrico De Pedis, who was a leading figure in Rome’s underworld when she vanished.
His remains were exhumed in 2012 but nothing was revealed.
In 2019, the Orlandi family received an anonymous letter saying Emanuela’s body might be hidden in the Vatican’s Teutonic Cemetery, where a statue of an angel holding a book reads ‘Requiescat in Pace’, Latin for ‘Rest in Peace’.
Two tombs were prised open but nothing was found – not even the bones of the two 19th century princesses said to have been buried there.
The most encouraging find came in 2018, when reports suggested bones found during work at the Vatican embassy in Rome could be those of Emanuela or another missing teen Mirella Gregori.
But DNA tests quickly put paid to those hopes.
Last month, Italy’s lower house approved the establishment of a parliamentary commission to investigate the disappearances of both girls.
Police have never excluded the possibility that Emanuela may have been abducted and possibly killed for reasons with no connection to the Vatican, or been a victim of human trafficking.
She would be 55 now.