Was Emanuela Orlandi the Victim of a Loved One? Forty years after the disappearance of the Vatican-based teenager, one of Italy’s most famous legal mysteries, the investigation could be headed for a family drama.
• Also read: Mysterious disappearance in 1983: Rome reopens the investigation into one of Italy’s most famous legal mysteries
Emanuela Orlandi, 15, whose father worked at the Vatican, was last seen on June 22, 1983 in central Rome leaving a music lesson.
Since then, this case has triggered countless speculations and has repeatedly fascinated Italians against the background of conspiracy theories surrounding the secret services, the Mafia, the high Vatican authorities and Freemasonry. This case also inspired a recently hit documentary series entitled Vatican Girl, which aired on Netflix.
But the information from the private television station La7 now opens up another path, namely that of family drama.
According to La7, the Vatican prosecutor recently delivered an exchange of letters between a senior Vatican official and a priest to his Roman counterpart in September 1983, three months after the girl’s disappearance.
Secretary of State Agostino Casaroli, number two at the Vatican, then wrote to a priest who had been the spiritual advisor to the Orlandi family.
Its purpose: to obtain confirmation that Natalina, the older sister of the disappeared, was sexually abused by her uncle Mario Meneguzzi, who has since died. The confessor realizes that the young girl had confessed to him. She was forbidden to speak, otherwise she would lose her post in the Chamber of Deputies, where her uncle, who ran the bar, had hired her some time earlier.
Facts known to the investigators at the time were confirmed by the direct testimony of Natalina Orlandi, according to La7.
Did uncle Mario kill Emanuela and you his crime?
He was close to internal security services at the time, answered certain anonymous calls from the Orlandi family and escaped a surveillance he was aware of without investigators knowing how, Italian media reported on Tuesday.
Finally, similar is the robotic portrait of the man seen with Emanuela Orlandi on June 22, 1983, the day of his disappearance.
But Emanuela’s brother Pietro, his sister Natalina and their lawyer Laura Segro, under whose pressure the Vatican and then the public prosecutor’s office in Rome resumed the file in 2023, do not believe it.
They accuse the Holy See of wanting to “exonerate” itself from its supposed responsibility in this matter. They were due to hold a press conference in Rome on Tuesday afternoon.
“I’m angry, angry. You’ve crossed the line like never before […] You can’t shift responsibility for everything to one family,” Pietro Orlandi told Adnkronos news agency.