"Sometimes silence is the worst crime". This is Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi. This Italian crime documentary series written and directed by Mark Lewis. Rome, 1983. After leaving a music lesson, fifteen-year-old Emanuela Orlandi vanishes — embroiling the Vatican in a decades-long mystery.
On Wednesday 22 June 1983, Orlandi called home to explain why she was not home yet. According to some reports, Orlandi allegedly met with the Avon rep shortly before her music lesson. At the end of the lesson, Orlandi spoke of the job offer with a girlfriend. Orlandi was allegedly last seen getting into a large, dark-coloured BMW. At 15:00 on Thursday 23 June, Orlandi's parents called the director of the music school to ask if any of their daughter's classmates had information. She was officially declared a missing person that day. Over the next two days, announcements of the disappearance were published with the telephone number of the Orlandi house in two Italian newspapers. At 18:00 on Saturday 25 June, a phone call was received from a youth who claimed to be a sixteen-year-old boy named "Pierluigi". He reported that he and his fiancée had met the missing girl in Piazza Navona that afternoon. On 28 June, a man calling himself "Mario" called the family and claimed to own a bar near Ponte Vittorio, between the Vatican and the music school. The man said that a girl called "Barbara", a new customer, had confided to him about being a fugitive from home but said that she would return home for her sister's wedding. On 30 June, Rome was plastered with a large number of posters displaying Orlandi's photograph. On Tuesday 5 July, the Orlandi family received the first of a number of anonymous phone calls. Emanuela was supposedly the prisoner of a terrorist group demanding the release of Mehmet Ali Ağca, the Turkish man who shot the Pope in May 1981. In the following days, other calls were received, including one from a man with an American accent, who played a recording of Orlandi's voice over the phone. A few hours later, in another phone call to the Vatican, the same man suggested an exchange, of Orlandi for Ağca. On 8 July, a man with an alleged Middle Eastern accent phoned one of Orlandi's classmates saying Orlandi was in his hands and that they had twenty days to make the exchange with Ağca. On the morning of 14 May 2001, the parish priest of the Gregory VII Church near the Vatican discovered a small human skull and lacking a jaw in a bag with an image of Padre Pio in a confessional. Although, it has not been identified as Orlandi's skull, the discovery generated suspicions that it might be Orlandi's. Orlandi's disappearance sparked an intense media frenzy in Italy that has resulted in the case being called "Italy’s most famous unsolved mystery", as well as marking one of the few known disappearances of a Vatican citizen.
The series struggles to convey a cohesive message, painting an inconsistent portrait of its central victim.
Simon says
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