The mystery of the 1983 disappearance of the 15-year-old
daughter of a Vatican employee took yet another twist Saturday following
excavations this week at a Vatican City cemetery: The Vatican said it had
discovered two sets of bones under a stone manhole that will be formally opened
next week.
The Vatican on Thursday had
pried open the tombs of two 19th-century German princesses in the cemetery of
the Pontifical Teutonic College in hopes of finding the remains of Emanuela
Orlandi, after her family received a tip she might be buried there.
Those hopes were dashed when
the tombs turned out to be completely empty, creating yet another mystery about
where the dead princesses were.
The Vatican noted at the time
that structural work had been carried out on both the college building and
cemetery near St. Peter’s Basilica in the 1800s and more recently, and that
further investigation would be done.
On Saturday, Vatican spokesman
Alessandro Gisotti said those investigations had centered on the areas
adjoining the tombs and had “identified two ossuaries, located under the
pavement of an area inside the Pontifical Teutonic College, covered by a
manhole.”
He said the area was
immediately sealed off and would be opened in the presence of forensic experts
July 20.
Gisotti added that the bones
were located in two holes carved out of a large stone that was covered by an
old pavement stone a few meters behind the princesses’ tomb. That area is now
technically part of the building of the Teutonic College, after expansion work
on the building encroached onto the cemetery field.
The last recorded structural
work done on the Teutonic College and cemetery was in the 1960s and 1970s.
Orlandi disappeared in 1983.
She vanished after leaving her
family’s Vatican City apartment to go to a music lesson in Rome. Her father was
a lay employee of the Holy See.
Her case has been one of the
enduring mysteries of the Vatican, kept alive by the Italian media and a quest
by her brother to find answers and closure. Over the years, her disappearance
has been linked to everything from the plot to kill St. John Paul II to the
financial scandal of the Vatican bank and Rome’s criminal underworld.
The last major twist in the
case came in 2012, when forensic police exhumed the body of a reputed mobster
from the crypt of a Roman basilica in hopes of finding Orlandi’s remains as
well. The search turned up no link.
Last year, bones were found
underneath the Vatican’s embassy to Italy in Rome. Italian media immediately
speculated the remains could belong to Orlandi or another girl who went missing
at around the same time. But forensic tests showed the bones long predated
their disappearances.
In 2017, a leading Italian
investigative journalist caused a sensation when he published a five-page
document that had been stolen from a locked Vatican cabinet that suggested the
Holy See had been involved in Orlandi’s disappearance. The Vatican immediately
branded the document a fake, though it never explained what it was doing in the
Vatican cabinet.
The document was purportedly
written by a cardinal and listed supposed expenses used for Orlandi’s upkeep
after she disappeared.
Orlandi’s brother, Pietro
Orlandi, has long demanded the Vatican give the family full access to all
information it has about Orlandi’s disappearance, keeping the cold case alive
for more than three decades.
Gisotti said this week that the
Holy See “has always shown attention and closeness to the suffering of the
Orlandi family and in particular Emanuela’s mother” and that its decision to
excavate the Teutonic cemetery at the family’s request was evidence of that
attention.