Mystery correspondence opens new front on ‘Vatican Girl’ disappearance
February 05, 2024
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CWN Editor's Note: The brother of Emanuela Orlandi—the teenage girl who disappeared in October 1983—has suggested that his sister surfaced in London some years later, and that a Vatican cardinal sought help from a British diplomat to secure an abortion for her.
Pietro Orlandi, who for years has tried to stir public interest in his sister’s fate, based his latest claim on a letter that he had obtained, supposedly written by Cardinal Ugo Poletti, the former vicar of Rome, to Frank Cooper, a former undersecretary of state in the UK. Both the cardinal and the British civil servant were retired at the time (1993) when the letter was allegedly written, and both are now deceased.
Pietro Orlandi conceded that he could not authenticate the letter, nor could he explain why a retired Vatican official would be writing to a retired British civil servant about the case. But he said that he thought it plausible that his sister had been in London in the 1990s.
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