The disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi is one of the darkest and most complex mysteries of our country. While there are three open investigations to shed light on the case of the 15-year-old Vatican girl who disappeared in 1983, we propose an accurate reconstruction of the early stages of the story, with audio from the time granted to FqMagazine exclusive by Pietro Orlandi.
The torture box
On July 17, 1983, less than a month after disappearance of Emanuela Orlandia box is sent to via della Dataria, at the headquarters of theAnsa Agency. Four days ago, another cassette It had been left under the colonnade of St. Peter’s by the alleged kidnappers, but was collected by Vatican officials. There are different transcripts of that tape delivered to Ansa. We know that Side A contains male voices with a foreign accent reading in Italian an official proclamation in which they ask for the release of the Pope’s attacker Ali Agca in exchange for Emanuela. The recording of Side B, of which we publish an extract with the permission of Pietro Orlandi, is an audio that gives you the shivers and after 41 years it still arouses deep disquiet when listeningo. You can hear the voice of a girl who is being abused, “subjected to painful stimulations of variable and progressively increasing intensity” (as can be read in a Sismi report). A few fragmented words emerge from this recording and the voice could be that of Emanuela Orlandi. She refers to blood, in her heart-rending moans. “It hurts“, he says and then again “enough, I feel bad” up to the terrible and repeated question: “God, why?”. The only person who listened to it was Ercole Orlandi, Emanuela’s father, who until his death always said he had the impression of recognizing his daughter’s voice in that tape, especially in that fragment where she says: “Please, will you let me sleep now?”.
There is also the noise of a projector in the background, so the noise could be at stake. tapes produced by two different devices, a projector that projected the scene and a tape recorder that recorded the content on audio cassette. On this side of the tape there are at least two different versionsfor content and duration. One hypothesis is that what we have received is a recording of a recording probably cut ad hoc as can also be heard from the cuts perceptible when listening. It is still It is unknown where the original version of that tape may be found.
From a research by Peter Orlandi among the documents of the time it came out that in those days, in 1983, that tape was analyzed by experts from the SISMI who put it down in black and white that that voice “corresponds to that of Emanuela”. Contrary to what was reported, a few days after listening to the recording, the investigators told Emanuela’s father that they had carefully checked the recording and that it wasclips from a porn movie put together by a mythomaniac. This version that we will let you listen to is the one recovered by Pietro Orlandi in 2016, once the investigations were concluded, and it is only a part of that original recording, then transferred to CD.
