Newly unearthed memo shows Vatican denying ransom payment in ‘Vatican Girl’ case

ROME – Confidential documents from forty years ago suggest that at the time of the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the so-called “Vatican girl” whose fate has become the premier contemporary Vatican mystery story, Italian security officials believed the Vatican might already have paid a ransom to secure her release, while a senior Vatican official denied it.

The documents have been unearthed as part of a bipartisan probe in the Italian parliament into both the Orlandi case and that of Mirella Gregori, another Italian teenager who vanished around the same time.

Stirring additional controversy is the fact that the documents apparently come from an Italian state archive on the Orlandi case which was originally classified as “empty” when parliamentary investigators first inquired about it, but which now has produced these two memoranda which were published on Friday by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

The discovery of the documents has also generated new questions about whether similar materials may be gathering dust in the Vatican’s own archives, despite repeated denials from Vatican spokespersons that such a file exists.

Thew first of the newly discovered memoranda is dated July 27, 1983, roughly one month after Orlandi disappeared on June 22.  It appears to be a set of investigatory notes for the files of the Italian security service, which at the time was known by the acronym Sismi. In brief, the memo says that Sismi had heard from the Italian carabinieri, or military police, several points regarding the Orlandi probe.

• That Orlandi’s father, Ercole Orlandi, was in possession of “very important” information from the Vatican. At the time, Orlandi was a minor official in the Prefecture of the Papal Household.
• That it was not true there had been no contact between the kidnappers and the family and the Vatican between June 22 and July 5, when anonymous phone calls began arriving at the family home.
• That a ransom payment had already been made.
• That the original group of kidnappers had already sold Orlandi to another criminal gang.
• That the Italian ambassador to the Vatican at the time had written a confidential report on the case which had been addressed to senior officials.

The second document carries the date of August 12, 1983, meaning roughly two weeks after the first. It too appears to be a set of notes for the investigation’s files in Sismi, and it begins with the statement that the day before, August 11, 1983, a meeting had been held in the Vatican with senior Italian investigators.

The memorandum says that because Italian Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican’s Sectretary of State at the time of the disappearance, was not available, the group had been received by then-Archbishop Eduardo Martínez Somalo, the sostituto, or “substitute,” effectively the pope’s chief of staff.

According to the memo, Martínez Somalo:

• Denied that the Vatican had paid any ransom in the Orlandi case.
• Cast suspicion upon a Bulgarian exile in Italy at the time named Theodor Hlebaroff, who had requested political asylum from the Vatican for his anti-Communist views and who allegedly frequented the Pontifical Institute for Sacred Music in Rome’s Piazza Navona where Orlandi disappeared after a flute lesson. Martínez Somalo supposedly told the group that Hlebaroff had expressed “grave threats” against the Vatican.
• Gave investigators information on a bank account linked to Hlebaroff.

The memo states that investigators then filed a request for help from Sismi officers in tracking down Hlebaroff, but does not provide any information about the success of those efforts. (Pietro Orlandi, the brother of Emanuela who has devoted his life to seeking the truth about his sister, has claimed that “Hlebaroff” is a fake, saying that Bulgarian birth records show no one by that name.)

Laura Sgrò, the attorney for the Orlandi family, argued that the memorandum suggests the Vatican must have matching records of such meetings, which it has never disclosed to investigators.

“We’ve never doubted that a file exists in the Vatican on the kidnapping of Emanuela Orlandi, which is the reason we asked for it loudly in 2017,” she said. “It’s too bad that here we are in 2025, we’re still talking about it, but we’ve never seen it.”

“Now I hope that the Vatican will make it available immediately to the Procurator of Rome and the parliamentary commission of investigation, with an eye towards collaboration in the search for the truth,” she said.

Over the years, spokespersons have said repeatedly that exhaustive reviews of Vatican archivers has turned up no such materials.