Italian Police to Open Tomb to Solve Girl's Disappearance

(July 6) -- For almost three decades, the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, 15, has haunted and fascinated the Italian public. The daughter of a Vatican employee vanished in June 1983 as she walked home from a flute lesson in central Rome. Some commentators have claimed she was kidnapped on the orders of a corrupt priest, others by the KGB. Investigators, though, have never been able to confirm what happened to the teen.

Now the case is back in the headlines after the Vatican announced that it would allow police to open the tomb of the gangster suspected of kidnapping Orlandi.

The tomb in question belongs to Enrico De Pedis -- the former head of Rome's Magliana gang, who was gunned down by rivals in 1990 -- and sits alongside the sarcophagi of saints and martyrs in the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in central Rome. That Vatican-owned church is located opposite Orlandi's music school, where she was last seen alive, stepping into a dark green BMW with an unidentified man.

In 2005, an anonymous caller to Italy's equivalent of Crime Stoppers suggested that if police looked inside the crypt, they'd find out what happened to the teen. The man who made that call has since been identified as the son of one of De Pedis' gangsters.

Now five years later, the Vatican -- operating through the Vicariate of Rome -- has said that it will allow Italian authorities to crack open the marble crypt and examine its contents. "The Vicariate of Rome expresses no objection to the request of Italian magistrates that the tomb of Signor De Pedis be inspected," the Vicariate said in a statement cited by The Daily Telegraph.

It's not clear whether investigators think they might find Orlandi's remains in the vault, or new evidence about her disappearance. A spokeswoman for the Rome police told the Daily Mail that they planned to open the tomb in August or September, and in the meantime would continue to interview witnesses to the case, which was reopened two years ago.

The decision by Rome's ecclesiastical authorities to allow De Pedis -- whose gang controlled Rome's drug market and was responsible for numerous murders -- to be interred at the 300-year-old church has been an ongoing source of controversy. In 1997, when his body was finally placed inside the tomb, Giampaolo Tronci, secretary-general of a police trade union, told the Guardian, ''I wonder what the murdered anti-mafia priests would think of this, given that not even they were granted this privilege."

The burial was approved by the then-rector of the church, Monsignor Pietro Vergara, on the grounds that De Pedis had "repented while in jail and also done a lot of work for charity," including handing large donations to the church, the Mail noted. Tronci, however, said that he suspected the dead mobster was interred in the sacred space because of his gang's connection to financial scandals involving the Vatican.

That theory was advanced in 2008, when De Pedis' former girlfriend Sabrina Minardi claimed American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus -- the disgraced head of the Vatican bank, who was accused of having links with organized crime -- ordered Orlandi's disappearance. Italian newspaper La Repubblica quoted her testimony to police, in which she said that Marcinkus, who died in 2006, wanted the girl snatched "to send a message to someone above them" as part of a "power game."

She added that after being held for an unspecified period of time, Orlandi was murdered and her body thrown into a cement mixer on the outskirts of Rome. In return for the kidnapping, Marcinkus allegedly helped De Pedis invest his gang's money overseas.

The Vatican rejected the accusations as "slanderous without basis."

But that's just one of many theories put forward to explain the girl's vanishing. Some commentators have claimed that Orlandi was grabbed on the orders of the KGB and was supposed to be used as a bargaining tool to secure the release of Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981 and was allegedly working for Soviet intelligence. Others have argued that the girl's father discovered Church documents connecting the Vatican bank with the Magliana gang, and that she was kidnapped to silence him.

Orlandi's family, though, refuses to speculate. "We will await the facts," her sister, Natalina, told The Daily Telegraph. "But I have never believed that Emanuela could be buried with De Pedis. As a Catholic, to think that an underworld boss could be laid to rest in a basilica is upsetting."