Vatican Mystery: Police Open Mobster’s Grave Seeking Missing Girl’s Body

An overwhelming stench filled the air as forensic experts in white pantsuits and masks mingled with priests in black clerical garb during the exhumation of a reputed Italian mobster from the crypt of a Roman basilica.

The scene Monday outside the church of Sant’Apollinare was hectic, with television cameras jostling for views inside the chapel and the adjacent courtyard of the Opus Dei-run Pontifical Holy Cross University, where forensic vans came and went.

The chaotic scenes were part of an investigation into one of the Vatican’s most enduring mysteries: the 1983 disappearance of the teenage daughter of one of its employees.

Medical experts took samples from the remains of Enrico De Pedis and removed boxes of old bones from the nearby ossuary, as part of the investigation into whether Emanuela Orlandi may have been buried alongside him, said a De Pedis family lawyer.

Ms. Orlandi was 15 when she disappeared in 1983 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.

Mr. De Pedis, a member of Rome’s Magliana mob, was killed in 1990. His onetime girlfriend has reportedly told prosecutors he kidnapped Ms. Orlandi. In 2005, an anonymous caller told a call-in TV show the answer to the girl’s disappearance lies in his tomb.

Amid a new push to resolve the case, the Vatican said last month it had no objections to opening the tomb.

Father Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said Monday the inspection of the De Pedis tomb was “certainly a positive fact” aimed at carrying out “all possible steps so the investigation could be completed.

“The prosecutors’ office can continue to count on the full collaboration of the church authorities,” he said.

Lorenzo Radogna, the De Pedis’ lawyer, said investigators had found 200 containers with bones near Mr. De Pedis’s tomb in the ossuary, and these would be tested.

Initially, the ANSA news agency reported the boxes had been discovered in Mr. De Pedis’s casket itself, but later said they were found in the ossuary.

Ms. Orlandi’s brother, Pietro, said samples from Mr. De Pedis’s body had been taken for further tests and the tomb reclosed. He said the corpse was in relatively good condition, but there was only one body – that of a male – inside the casket.

There had initially been speculation Ms. Orlandi’s kidnapping was linked in some way to an assassination attempt on pope John Paul II two years earlier and the jailing of the gunman, Ali Agca.

Doubts have also been cast on whether the Vatican itself had co-operated fully with the investigation.

In 2008, Italian news reports quoted Mr. De Pedis’s former girlfriend as telling prosecutors Ms. Orlandi had been kidnapped by the Magliana gang on the orders of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the U.S. prelate who had headed the Vatican bank and was linked to a huge Italian banking scandal in the 1980s.

Bishop Marcinkus, who has since died, had always asserted his innocence in the scandal and the Vatican at the time of the allegation said the woman’s claims had “extremely doubtful value.”

In a lengthy statement last month, Fr. Lombardi insisted the Holy See had done everything possible to try to resolve the case.

Mr. Orlandi said the move to open the tomb was a step forward in the investigation, and he hoped it showed a new willingness by the Vatican to co-operate fully and show full transparency about what it knows.

“I think it’s something very positive, both from the point of view of the Vatican and the prosecutors,” he said.

Speculation has long swirled around the location of Mr. De Pedis’s tomb – in a prominent church alongside important Catholics – an unusual final resting place for a reputed mobster. Sant’Apollinare is right next to the elegant Piazza Navona in Rome’s historic centre.

It is believed that when Mr. De Pedis was gunned down in 1990 by a rival on a Rome street, his family asked if he could be buried in a crypt in the basilica because they feared his grave would be desecrated by gang rivals if he were buried in a public cemetery.

Church officials first said no, but later changed their minds after the mobster’s family made a contribution of one billion lire, about $640,000 today, according to Italian media reports.

As the exhumation went on in the crypt, a priest was solemnly celebrating Latin mass.

Among those in the adjacent courtyard speaking with medical personnel was Monsignor Pedro Huidobro, rector who was a coroner before being ordained a priest.

Mr. De Pedis’s casket is expected to be moved to another location for reburial in the near future.

Source: The Associated Press with files from Reuters

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