Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi

The Vatican has opened up two tombs inside a tiny cemetery

in the hopes of solving

a 36-year-old disappearance of a teenage girl.

Emanuela Orlandi vanished

after a music lesson on June 22nd, 1983.

By agreeing to open up these tombs, the Vatican is finally admitting

that someone inside may have been involved.

The case of Emanuela Orlandi is not a simple story

of disappearance of one girl.

So many Italians remain convinced that there is still a cover-up going on.

It's much more.

All the police have to work on

is a tape-recorded message received this week,

barely audible, the girl is heard begging for her life.

An anonymous caller in Italy warned that a kidnapped girl would be killed

unless the man who tried to kill the Pope is freed.

Agca said the Russians trained him.

And the KGB?

Yes, and KGB.

After Emanuela disappeared,

the house key was always in the lock.

We'll never stop looking for her.

I think that the Vatican knows what happened to Emanuela.

This story sounds, to, uh, a lot of Americans, a lot like

uh, a Dan Brown novel.

How does the Pope know?

Who gave to him this information?

It was a mystery,

or it was the beginning of a mystery.

It's all a game of power.

This is so serious

that it would be the biggest scandal in the contemporary history of the church.

The Vatican has a history of 2,000 years of secrets.

In Italy we say...

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My name is Pietro Orlandi.

I was born and raised in the Vatican with my four sisters.

Natalina, who was the eldest,

and then Federica,

and Emanuela, and Maria Cristina.

My sister Emanuela has been missing for 37 years now.

This is the living room where she would study.

And here is the kitchen,

where, that day, my mom was making pizza.

There, this was her bedroom.

It hasn't changed.

This was her bed.

Here, there are still a lot of her dolls.

She loved pop music.

She was a fan of Claudio Baglioni.

I always made fun of her for it.

My sister went missing...

on the 22nd of June, 1983.

Good evening, this is the CBS evening news.

Dan Rather reporting.

Pope John Paul II returned home today.

Home to his Poland, home to an anguished country in turmoil.

Richard Roth was there...

I still remember how hot it was on that day.

Welcome back friends.

African high pressure is affecting the Lazio region,

causing scorching days across the area.

In central Rome,

temperatures will reach 37 degrees Celsius with a humidity of...

Emanuela played the flute, the piano,

and sang in a choir.

That day, she was supposed to be rehearsing

for the end-of-year school show.

She was carrying the flute

and the leather bag she always wore on her shoulder.

And she said, "Will you give me a lift?"

"Come on, please, give me a lift, it's hot."

Since I couldn't, I repeatedly told her "I can't, I can't."

But I could have taken her if I wanted to.

Maybe in that moment I was just being lazy, and...

I regret that so much now.

She looked at me, maybe told me to get lost.

She said something else, slammed the door, and...

and she left.

The Pope arrived in a bullet-proofed car.

Security agents in dark suits were behind him.

John Paul celebrated the mass at an altar with a giant...

Emanuela was not an ordinary child.

She was a Vatican girl living in a building inside the Vatican,

which means inside the borders of the Vatican.

Which is a state into another state.

It's like a monarchy, and the Pope is the king.

0.2 square miles,

with a population of just a hundred secular people.

It's a very unusual place.

My family served for many years,

serving seven Popes.

And we spent our childhoods within those walls.

We lived in the Vatican like you would a small village.

The only difference between the Vatican and a village was that at midnight,

the Vatican closed its gate.

Her school is outside the Vatican.

Before leaving school, Emanuela calls home

and my sister Federica answers.

I was at home, studying.

And Emanuela called home

sometime between the hours of 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m...

to tell me that a man had approached her outside of school

saying he represented Avon.

He offered her a small job...

handing out leaflets and advertising Avon's cosmetics line.

Cristina and her friends were set to meet her at 7:00 p.m.

We had arranged to meet near,

between Ponte Castel Sant'Angelo and the Palazzaccio bridge.

But once we got there, we waited a bit,

until sometime around 7:30, 7:35,

by which time Emanuela hadn't shown up.

Throughout this trip,

Vatican agents expect the Pope to walk a thin line

between religion and politics.

When I got home, I went in and asked, "Is Emanuela back?

Mom and Dad said, "No, not yet. Why?"

I said, "It's just that we were supposed to meet up and she never showed,

so I thought she'd already come home."

John Paul has made his own feelings clear

about Polan's progress since martial law.

By 9:30, we were panicking

because it was way past the Orlandi household's normal curfew.

So we decided to go out,

meet her on her route, go look for her somewhere.

I tried calling all the hospitals.

We then met up with my mom and dad

in front of the music school.

And immediately we found something...

It was just wrong. Something was wrong.

And my father decided to file a report.

They said it was too soon to report her missing.

And they sent us away.

The gate shuts at midnight.

My father was really worried, agitated.

I remember he called uncle Mario straight away,

who immediately came to our house with his son, Pietro.

I knew Rome well...

So, I got up and said to Pietro, "Look, Pietro...

...let's go take a look around Rome."

The first thing we did was we took her photo with us,

and show it to people.

It was like I was living through something strange, you know?

A kind of nightmare.

I go, "My God, what happened to her?"

You start assuming the worst.

Honestly, I was convinced

that Emanuela had been, quote, "drugged".

That's what I thought.

I remember being on the back of the bike

and falling asleep.

The next morning, I went to report Emanuela missing.

This is the photo we showed the police, the one that we gave them.

They glanced at the photo and attempting to comfort me, they said,

"Well, I wouldn't worry. She's not really all that pretty,

at least not pretty enough to have been abducted.

She probably just ran off on her own accord."

My name is Mauro Obinu.

In 1983, I was a Captain of the Carabinieri in Rome.

I remember that in the course of the initial inquiries,

we found out two people,

a traffic warden and a retired police officer,

had noticed a girl similar to Emanuela,

getting approached by someone.

They described him as a man of about 35 to 40 years of age,

about 1 meter 80.

The officers said that he parked his car,

which was described as a green BMW...

in Corso Rinascimento, near Palazzo Madama,

the seat of the Italian Senate.

This information led us to believe that this person...

could have been the Avon man.

But that year...

...dozens of teenagers had gone missing,

only to return home shortly after.

At the time, my personal impression

was that the disappearance of the young Emanuela

could have fallen into this category.

She was not the sort to voluntarily run off like that.

We knew that much.

My uncle called the newspaper Il Tempo to have them release a short piece.

It came out on the 24th.

It was just a little photo of her with a description,

"15-year-old girl missing since June 22nd, 1983."

And we included our home phone number.

In 1983 I was just 30 years old,

working for Corriere Della Sera which was the leading newspaper in Italy.

It was quite usual in cases of missing people

to see ads like this one.

But in this case,

we suddenly realized that this girl was a Vatican girl.

My editor was shocked by that.

He said, "Okay, we need to understand

what was going on behind the case."

That's when things got crazy. All these telephone calls.

Crazy people would call...

Everyone.

Most Poles certainly hope

for a message from the Pope.