Prosecutor confirms existence of dossier in Vatican equivalent of Kennedy assassination

A dossier on the infamous case of the disappearance of a teenage girl that was claimed to exist by her brother but denied by the Vatican has now been acknowledged as existing.

The Vatican’s Promoter of Justice, Alessandro Diddi, confirmed the existence of a file on Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee who disappeared in 1983 at the age of 15, and whose disappearance has gone on to become Italy’s most notorious unsolved cold case.

Over the past four decades, the fate of Orlandi, who came to be known as the “Vatican Girl”, has become the Italian equivalent of the Kennedy assassination, generating an enormous volume of speculation and conspiracy theories of all sorts.

“The dossier that Pietro Orlandi is talking about exists,” Diddi said, speaking at the presentation of a new book, The Throne and the Altar, by Vatican journalist Antonietta Calabro. “We found it, but its contents are confidential.”

The Vatican’s Promoter of Justice, also known as the Promoter of Justice (Promotore di Giustizia), is a key figure in the Vatican City State’s judicial system, responsible for investigating crimes and prosecuting criminal cases within the city state.

The dossier in question is the same one that Emanuela’s older brother, Pietro Orlandi, who has led the quest to establish the truth about his sister’s disappearance for the past 40 years, claimed was commissioned in 2012 by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, former personal secretary to Pope Benedict XVI, and entrusted to the head of the Vatican gendarmerie, Domenico Giani.

On 21 November, Giani testified before an Italian parliamentary commission investigating Orlandi’s disappearance, confirming that he put together a folder in 2012 at Gänswein’s request.

Giani, head of the Vatican gendarmes from 2006 to 2019, said that file was simply an “historical reconstruction” of the Orlandi case that didn’t contain any new information.

“The Holy See did not undertake any investigative activity,” he said, stressing that at the time of the disappearance, the case was handled by Italian authorities.

“I am not a witness to anything,” he told the commission.

The existence of the dossier was initially denied by Monsignor Sergio Pagano, prefect of the Vatican Archives, in an interview with the program The Tower of Babel on Italian television channel La7.

In the interview, Pagano said the only file that existed on the disappearance of Orlandi consisted of a series of media clippings about the case taken from Eco della Stampa, an Italian media-monitoring company.

In his remarks confirming the existence of the dossier, Diddi also insisted that the dossier did not amount to an investigation, but rather it was a historical gathering of facts and information surrounding the case over the years.

Many of these details have related to the Vatican, since Orlandi’s father was a minor official in the Prefecture of the Papal Household at the time of her disappearance, when the family lived in a Vatican apartment.

Popular fascination with the case was revived by the 2022 Netflix documentary series Vatican Girl, which created enough momentum that three different new investigations were launched: one by the Vatican’s Promoter of Justice, one by the Roman prosecutor’s office and the other by the Italian parliamentary commission, which includes representatives of all political parties from both the Italian house and the senate.

Diddi said that there are five leads to follow, “from the trafficking of white women to the lead linked to family problems”.

Various theories have been floated as to the motive behind Orlandi’s disappearance, including that she was kidnapped by the Italian mob to pressure the Vatican for money, that she was caught up in a paedophilic clerical sex ring, that an uncle who had previously made advances to one of her sisters was responsible, and even that her case was linked to Mehmet Ali Ağca, the would-be assassin of St. John Paul II in 1981.

Diddi in his remarks said of the various leads that they “obviously cannot all be true” and that “they exclude themselves”.

“We are trying to eliminate the unrealistic ones,” he added.

Referring to the Italian parliament’s inquiry, Diddi said there is “respect for borders: Italy is investigating, and we are not competing, we are collaborating”.

The Vatican City State is the smallest internationally recognised independent state in the world – both in terms of area and population – that exists as an enclave within Rome, Italy.

“I would like to work without having a personal opinion because personal ideas make you deviate from the facts,” Diddi said. “Each reconstruction has its own plausibility.”

He added: “I do not want to be convinced of any for now. We are talking about a terrible story about which many are speculating.”

In response to Diddi’s confirmation of the dossier, Pietro Orlandi said: “Let’s pretend to believe that they found the dossier now and that it hadn’t already been in the Secretariat of State since 2012, but that’s fine.”

He aded: “The important thing is that they admitted to having it. Of course, we hope it has not been modified.”

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Photo: Reporters gather around Pietro Orlandi (unseen), the brother or Emanuela Orlandi, a teenage girl who disappeared in 1983 in one of Italy’s darkest mysteries, and the family’s lawyer Laura Sgro (unseen) as they leave the Vatican after attending the opening of two tombs within the Vatican’s grounds in the Teutonic Cemetery to see if either contained the girl’s remains, 11 July 2019. (Photo credit ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP via Getty Images.)

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