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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

A teenager heading home from music school in 1983 never made it back, prompting an investigation that would last for decades.

The family suffered through many false leads regarding the disappearance, including a Turkish terrorist and a pathological liar.

Despite a message detailing where to find her body, the tomb indicated was empty, and the girl remains missing.

Among the heavenly domes and spires of Vatican City lurks a secret that has been haunting the Holy See for decades. Vatican officials went eerily quiet when a teenage girl vanished on an early summer evening in 1983. Somewhere in the darkest backrooms of an institution that is supposed to be the highest pillar of Catholicism, there might be evidence that could mean salvation or damnation.

Emanuela Orlandi grew up within the walls of Vatican City. Because her father, Ercole Orlandi, was employed in the papal household, she and her siblings often ran freely through the gardens that were their backyard. The papal city seemed like a protected enclave. At 15, Emanuela was enamored with music, a singer who also played the flute and piano. She often took the bus to the music school at Piazza di Sant’Apollinare. Before one of her classes on June 22, 1983, she was approached by an Avon representative offering her a job handing out flyers at a fashion show. When Emanuela called home from a pay phone, Federica Orlandi, who was skeptical about the offer, had no idea she would never speak to her sister again.

The last time anyone glimpsed Emanuela was around 7:30 pm, when she was waiting at the bus stop with another girl. Hours passed, and the family began to scour the grounds surrounding the school and the Vatican, later reporting her missing to local police . Officers had supposedly seen her talking to a man holding an Avon bag who drove a forest green BMW. After they tracked the car down, one of its windows had been smashed from the inside, possibly by someone desperate to escape. Whoever had been driving it had long since fled.

Headlines flooded the next day’s newspapers. Suspicion turned to Pierluigi Magnesio, a sixteen-year-old friend of Emanuela’s who told police that his fiancée had met the girl (or, at least someone fitting her description, down to the flute and a mention of Avon cosmetics) in the city square of Campo de’ Fiori. It wasn’t long afterward that a mysterious voice identified only as “Mario” called. He also gave a description that possibly aligned with Emanuela, except the girl he’d encountered called herself Barbara, hailed from Venice , and mentioned running away to sell Avon until her sister’s wedding brought her back (Emanuela’s older sister Natalina was to be married soon). It wasn’t long before black and white posters of Emanuela marked SCOMPARSA (MISSING) were plastered all over Vatican City.

During this same period, the Vatican was entangled in some questionable matters. Rome was struggling to oust communism in countries behind the Iron Curtain, where Catholics were forced to worship undercover as Soviet leaders fought to eliminate religion. Pope John Paul II flew to his home country of Poland in 1981 on a pilgrimage that doubled as an anti-communism effort thought to have been funded by the mafia, and returned to an assassination attempt. Mehmet Ali Ağca was a known anti-Catholic leftist associated with both a Turkish terrorist organization and the KGB, and an anonymous caller with an American accent frightened the Orlandi family when he claimed he was with terrorists who’d kidnapped Emanuela in exchange for freeing Ağca. He came to be known only as “The American.”

Speculation about who was behind Emanuela’s abduction shifted to high-ranking mobsters. There had recently been a murder purposely staged as a threat to the Vatican for repayment of what must have been a massive sum, and meanwhile, “The American” continued to harass the Vatican for an exchange of prisoners. In 2005, Sabrina Minardi, former lover of Banda della Magliana gang leader Enrico De Pedis , gave shocking testimony that Emanuela had been kept in his apartment while being repeatedly drugged. She even recognized the voice of an unnamed caller as one of De Pedis’ henchmen. As Minardi remembered, Emanuela was eventually transported elsewhere in a black car with Vatican license plates.

Could the Vatican itself have been involved in Emanuela’s sudden disappearance? Just a day before she was abducted, a friend of Emanuela remembers her confiding that she’d been sexually assaulted by a cardinal while taking a walk in the Vatican Gardens. In 2015, the VatiLeaks scandal that exposed the excessive spending of the Vatican would unearth a document marked “expenses to support the domestic removal of the citizen Emanuela Orlandi.” Pages and pages of expense records through 1997 revealed the Vatican had known more than it cared to admit. Also recorded there was the address of a youth hostel in London run by the Scalabrini Fathers , who had close ties to the Vatican. Then, an ominous message arrived.

“If you want to find Emanuela, search where the angel is looking.” After years of false leads and misleading information—including a career criminal insisting he was “The American” who was proven a fraud by investigators—the Orlandi family was convinced they finally had an answer in 2019. A message that had reached their lawyer indicated that Emanuela had been buried in the Teutonic Cemetery at the College Teutonico near St. Peter’s Basilica. Forensics experts opened the “Tomb of the Angel,” where two German princesses were supposed to have been buried in the 19 th century, but Emanuela was not there. What the forensics team did find were thousands of bones from dozens of individuals, but results of the analysis done on those bones were inconclusive.

“No matter which is the right theory, there are grains of truth in every one,” Pietro said in Vatican Girl. “And in all these cases, all roads lead to the Vatican.”

Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.

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