Confidential documents from forty years ago that have been discovered suggest that at the time of the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, Italian security officials believed the Vatican might already have paid a ransom to secure her release, even though a senior Vatican official denied it.
The documents have been unearthed as part of a bipartisan probe in the Italian parliament into both the case of Orlandi, the so-called “Vatican girl” whose fate has become the premier contemporary Vatican mystery story, and that of Mirella Gregori, another Italian teenager who vanished around the same time.
